S-, a male child, four clays' old, was brought from a village to the Colvin Hospital, Allahabad, at about 6 o'clock on the evening of the 31st March, 1884. The hospital dhai came to me and reported that a baby had arrived in whom the natural passage of defecation was absent. I immediately went over to the hospital and saw it. The face was pinched ; the baby could cry only faintly, the breathing...

In order to make virtual modeling as easy as real clay manipulation, we describe a realtime virtual clay model, specially designed for direct hand manipulation. We build on a previous layered model for clay, extending it to handle local properties such as colour or fluidity, to deal with an arbitrary number of tools, and to capture twist effects due to rotating tools. The resulting clay model i...

Polymer/clay nanocomposites have been under an extensive investigation for about 15 years. Traditional methods to modify the clay are usually limited to small organic cations, preferably containing long alkyl chain(s), which are exchanged with the inorganic cations in the clay gallery. This article provides a comprehensive review on the strategies for clay modification using polymeric surfactan...

When woody plant abundance increases in grasslands and savannas, a phenomenon widely observed worldwide, there is considerable uncertainty as to whether aboveground net primary productivity (ANPP) and ecosystem carbon (C) and nitrogen (N) pools increase, decrease, or remain the same. We estimated ANPP and C and N pools in aboveground vegetation and surface soils on shallow clay and clay loam so...

Boom clay has been selected as a potential host rock formation for the geological disposal of radioactive waste in Belgium. In the present work, the hydro-mechanical behaviour of Boom clay samples from the borehole Essen-1 at a depth of 220-260 m and from HADES that is the underground rock laboratory at Mol in Belgium, at 223-m depth was investigated in the laboratory by performing low pressure...

A High Cation Exchange Capacity (HCM) montmorillonite clay has been prepared by acetate treatment of Zenith clay. The HCM has been evaluated for metal-uptake from aqueous solutions. The present data show that the cation exchange sites can play a significant role in the adsorption of metals in smectite clays. A theoretical analysis scheme has been developed which shows that permanent-charge site...

This mini-review article addresses the development in synthesizing polyolefin/clay nanocomposites by olefin polymerization under catalysis of clay intercalated precatalysts in recent years. The review comprises three parts which focus on mainly the synthetic route, structural characterization, and properties of polyolefin/clay nanocomposites, respectively. Moreover, outlook for future research ...

A plate-plate binary colloid system of photocatalytically active titanate and inert clay nanosheets shows macroscopically separated multiphase coexistence. Two liquid crystalline phases and one isotropic phase coexist at high titanate and low clay concentrations whereas the colloids are destabilized at high clay concentrations.

The addition of inexpensive montmorillonite clay to a silicone resin employed as preceramic polymer was found to be advantageous for the production of SiOC glass matrix composites. Dense SiOC based monoliths were achieved with the addition of a substantial amount of calcined clay (30 wt.%) to the preceramic polymer; these composites exhibited remarkable hardness and fracture toughness, higher t...