The success of a complete denture depends on the fit of the denture, occlusion, esthetics, and other factors. A poorly fitting denture, irritation and other discomforts currently are treated by dentists with the use of tissue conditioners and soft liners.i-3 It is desirable for tissue conditioners to adapt to the oral mucosa as it heals and also to absorb stresses during mastication. Soft liner...

Most gases and vapours with a bipolar molecular structure absorb infrared energy. If such a gas is interposed between an object emitting infrared radiation and a thermocamera the gas will absorb some of the infrared radiation and thus cast a shadow on the thermocamera picture. In this assay it is possible to visualise the gas. This method had been used to study pollution with anaesthetic gases ...

Among all known materials, we found that a forest of vertically aligned single-walled carbon nanotubes behaves most similarly to a black body, a theoretical material that absorbs all incident light. A requirement for an object to behave as a black body is to perfectly absorb light of all wavelengths. This important feature has not been observed for real materials because materials intrinsically...

Cathodoluminescence spectroscopy is profitably exploited to study energy transfer mechanisms in Au and Pt/black TiO2 heterostructures. While Pt nanoparticles absorb light in the UV region, Au nanoparticles absorb light by surface plasmon resonance and interband transitions, both of them occurring in the visible region. The intra-bandgap states (oxygen vacancies) of black TiO2 play a key role in...

There are 1.9 hectares of productive land available for each of the 6 billion people living in the world at present. In our industrialised Western society it is sometimes hard to realise quite how fundamental land is to our life on earth. The top six inches of land, which is soil, has to provide us with all our food. The land has to absorb much of our waste and is the catchment and filter for o...