We report an interesting observation of minimization of bacterial attachment on titanium nitride coatings of increased thickness. DC magnetron sputtering method was used to prepare titanium nitride coatings of different thickness and the attachment of an oral bacteria Porphyromonas gingivalis was studied. With increase in thickness of the coatings the particle size increased and the order of ba...

BACKGROUND/AIMS To determine the reproducibility of the Humphrey optical coherence tomography scanner (OCT), software version 5.0, for measurement of retinal nerve fibre layer (RNFL) thickness in normal subjects and to compare OCT measurements with published histological thickness of the human RNFL. METHODS Three independent measurements were obtained at each session for one eye from 15 norma...

We consider a diffusion process with coefficients that are periodic outside of an ‘interface region’ of finite thickness. The question investigated in this article is the limiting long time / large scale behaviour of such a process under diffusive rescaling. It is clear that outside of the interface, the limiting process must behave like Brownian motion, with diffusion matrices given by the sta...

Greater leaf thickness is usually associated with greater leaf carbon assimilation rate, but the tradeoff between thicker versus larger leaves also affects canopy structure and light interception. Many studies equate the ratio of dry leaf mass to area (leaf specific mass) with leaf thickness. This approximation has utility but ignores differences in true thickness due to variation in water or a...

To investigate the independent effect of myocardial wall thickness and myocardial perfusion pressure on integrated backscatter, experiments were designed in which integrated backscatter of normally perfused myocardial tissue was measured while changes in wall thickness during the cardiac cycle were reduced to a minimum. In nine blood-perfused isolated pig hearts, perfusion pressure was uncouple...

BACKGROUND Obesity and emaciation in horses have major detrimental effects on health and morbidity, reproductive failure, work performance or carcass quality. Scoring is a current management tool used to assess and monitor equine body condition due to its simplicity and low cost. However, accurate assessment of obesity remains a challenge, even though a number of approaches have been tested, pa...

We have measured the high-angle x-ray diffraction from crystalline Pb-amorphous Ge multilayers. The experimental data in conjunction with a model calculation for the fluctuation in amorphous-layer thickness show that this fluctuation is larger than about 5%. A smaller thickness variation implies the existence of high-angle peaks which have not been observed in any amorphous-crystalline multilay...

A three-dimensional exact solution is presented for free and forced vibrations of simply supported functionally graded rectangular plates. Suitable displacement functions that identically satisfy boundary conditions are used to reduce equations governing steady state vibrations of a plate to a set of coupled ordinary differential equations, which are then solved by employing the power series me...

Kernel thickness is one of the most important traits in kernel structure, and is related to yield. To ascertain its genetic information more clearly, an immortal recombinant inbred line segregation population was used to map the quantitative trait loci (QTLs) for kernel thickness. As a result, two QTLs were identified on chromosome 9; both of them had negative additive effects, and could decrea...

Root diameter, a critical indicator of root physiological function, varies greatly among tree species, but the underlying mechanism of this high variability is unclear. Here, we sampled 50 tree species across tropical and temperate zones in China, and measured root morphological and anatomical traits along the first five branch orders in each species. Our objectives were (i) to reveal the relat...