Aggregate base plays an important role in a pavement structure. It supports the asphalt concrete (AC) layer and reduces the wheel load-induced stresses on the underlying layers so that the stresses transmitted to the subgrade do not result in excessive deformation. The base layer also functions as a drainage layer. Consequently, it is important to understand the drainage and strength characteri...

Compromises of our computer systems are inevitable. New software vulnerabilities are discovered and exploited daily, but even if the software is bug-free, administrators may inadvertently make mistakes in configuring permissions, or unaware users may click on buttons in application installers with little understanding of its consequences. Unfortunately, recovering from those inevitable compromi...

Hydroformylation, a reaction that adds carbon monoxide and dihydrogen across an unsaturated carbon-carbon multiple bond, has been widely employed in the chemical industry since its discovery in 1938. In contrast, the reverse reaction, retro-hydroformylation, has seldom been studied. The retro-hydroformylation reaction of an aldehyde into an alkene and synthesis gas (a mixture of carbon monoxide...

It is well known that the performance of hot mix asphalt (HMA) in service life is closely related to a proper aggregate gradation. A laboratory study was conducted to investigate the effects of nominal maximum aggregate size (NMAS) on the performance of stone matrix asphalt (SMA). The volumetric characteristics and performance properties obtained from wheel tracking tests, permeability test, be...

Human embryonic stem cell research can bring about major biomedical breakthroughs and thus contribute enormously to human welfare, yet it raises serious moral problems because it involves using human embryos for experiment. The ‘‘moral status of the human embryo’’ remains the core of such debates. Three different positions regarding the moral status of the human embryo can be categorised: the ‘...

When a composite of nonlinear particles suspended in a host medium is subjected to a sinusoidal electric field, the electrical response in the composite will generally consist of alternating current (ac) fields at frequencies of higher-order harmonics. The situation becomes more interesting when the suspended particles are graded, with a spatial variation in the dielectric properties. The local...

Many cell functions in all living organisms rely on protein-based molecular recognition involving disorder-to-order transitions upon binding by molecular recognition features (MoRFs). A well accepted computational tool for identifying likely protein-protein interactions is sequence alignment. In this paper, we propose the combination of sequence alignment and disorder prediction as a tool to im...