Plant specialization on soils derived from unusual parent materials is an important contributor to regional biodiversity. These stressful substrates include serpentine, gabbro, and other ultramafic rocks rich in heavy metals. The effect of substrate on plant diversity is illustrated by serpentine soils in California: they comprise less than 1% of the surface of the state (1), but serpentine end...

The current work presents a novel microfluidic approach, allowing full separation of blood cells. approach relies on using polydimethylsiloxane serpentine microchannel equipped with series electrodes, providing two zones. proposed design exploits the unique configuration channel along inherent difference in dielectric properties three kinds cells to achieve size-based sorting. platelets (PLTs) ...

The shock equation of state of serpentine has been determined to 150 GPa. Four distinct regions occur along the Hugoniot: a low-pressure phase, a mixed phase region, a high-pressure phase, and a very high pressure phase. The low-pressure phase (LPP) exists under shock pressures to about 40 GPa. This material exhibits shock properties that are partially consistent with those of low pressure serp...

The resonant transmission of self-collimated beams through zigzag-box resonators is demonstrated experimentally and numerically. Numerical simulations show that the flat-wavefront and the width of the beam are well maintained after passing through zigzag-box resonators because the up and the down zigzag-sides prevent the beam from spreading out and the wavefront is perfectly reconstructed by th...

Serpentine soils represent stressful habitats where plants have to cope with heavy metals, moisture limitation and low nutrient availability. We propose that facilitation is an important mechanism structuring plant communities under such stressful conditions. Facilitation has been shown to generate the spatial association of species, forming discrete vegetation patches of phylogenetically dista...