Anisotropy or alignment is a critical feature of functional soft materials in living organisms, but it remains a challenge for spontaneously generating anisotropic gel materials. Here we report a molecular design that increases intermolecular aromatic-aromatic interactions of hydrogelators during enzymatic hydrogelation for spontaneously forming an anisotropic hydrogel. This process, relying on...

Heterogeneous materials with randomly distributed pores are ubiquitous, such as sintered silver nanoparticles, concrete materials, 3D printed polymers, and natural bones. Recent experimental investigations have revealed that porosity also pore-related geometries (size, number, shape, distribution alignment) significant impacts on the mechanical behavior of random porous materials. However, exis...

The relative visual positions of briefly flashed stimuli are systematically modified in the presence of motion signals. We have recently shown that the perceived position of a spatially extended flash stimulus is anisotropically shifted toward a single convergent point back along the trajectory of a moving object without a significant change in the perceived shape of the flash [Watanabe, K., & ...

In this work we introduce a curvature based shape feature extraction technique. To construct the proposed descriptor, first an input color channel is subject to edge detection and gradient computations. Then, based on the gradient map and edge map, the local curvature of the contour is computed for each pixel as the angular difference between the maximum and minimum gradient angle within a cert...

Correction for 'Particle shape optimization by changing from an isotropic to an anisotropic nanostructure: preparation of highly active and stable supported Pt catalysts in microemulsions' by Riny Y. Parapat et al., Nanoscale, 2013, 5, 796-805.

Anisotropic metal nanoparticles have been paid much attention because the broken symmetry of these nanoparticles often leads to novel properties. Anisotropic gold nanoparticles obtained by wet chemical methods inevitably accompany spherical ones due to the intrinsically high symmetry of face-centred cubic metal. Therefore, it is essential for the purification of anisotropic gold nanoparticles. ...

This paper describes a simple and versatile method for growing highly anisotropic nanostructures of Pd, single-crystal nanobars bounded by {100} facets and single-crystal nanorods with their side surfaces enclosed by {100} and {110} facets. According to thermodynamic arguments, Pd atoms should nucleate and grow in a solution phase to form cuboctahedrons of spherical shape with their surfaces bo...

In this paper, the well-known SIFT detector is extended with a bivariate feature localization. This is done by using function models that assume a Gaussian feature shape for the detected features. As function models we propose (a) a bivariate Gaussian and (b) a Difference of Gaussians. The proposed detector has all properties of SIFT, but provides invariance to affine transformations and blurri...