An ultrasound indentation system with a pen-size hand-held probe was developed and used to obtain the effective Young's moduli of forearm and lower limb soft tissues in 12 subjects. Since the probe is manually driven, the alignment of the probe and control of the rate of indentation are parameters upon which the results obtained depend. This paper addresses whether manual indentation tests with...

The paper discusses the problem of manufacturability of the minimum compliance designs of the structural elements made of two kinds of inhomogeneous materials: the isotropic and cubic. In both the cases the unit cost of the design is assumed as equal to the trace of the Hooke tensor. The Isotropic Material Design (IMD) delivers the optimal distribution of the bulk and shear moduli within the de...

We describe a new class of N = 2 topological amplitudes that compute a particular class of BPS terms in the low energy effective supergravity action. Specifically they compute the coupling F 2(λλ)g−2(∂φ)2 where F , λ and φ are gauge field strengths, gaugino and holomorphic vector multiplet scalars. The novel feature of these terms is that they depend both on the vector and hypermultiplet moduli...

The role of moduli stabilization in predictions for CP violation is examined in the context of four-dimensional effective supergravity models obtained from the weakly coupled heterotic string. We point out that while stabilization of compactification moduli has been studied extensively, the determination of background values for other scalars by dynamical means has not been subjected to the sam...

The moduli space of N = 1 type II warped compactions to flat space with generic internal fluxes is studied. Using the underlying integrable generalized complex structure that characterizes these vacua, the different deformations are classified by H-twisted generalized cohomologies and identified with chiral and linear multiplets of the effective four-dimensional theory. The Kähler potential for...

We compute threshold effects to gauge couplings in four-dimensional Z N orientifold models of type I strings with N = 2 and N = 1 supersymmetry, and study their dependence on the geometric moduli. We also compute the tree-level (disk) couplings of the open sector gauge fields to the twisted closed string moduli of the orbifold in various models and study their effects and that of the one-loop t...

Recent developments in the theory of extra dimensions have opened up avenues to confront such theories with cosmological tests. We discuss a brane-world model with a bulk scalar field, motivated by supergravity. The low-energy effective action is derived and physical constraints on the parameters of the model discussed. The cosmological evolution of the brane-world moduli is investigated and it...