Photo-induced molecular motion in a liquid crystal polymer film including azobenzene was studied by the heterodyne transient grating method. The film was confined in a liquid crystal cell, where it is a photomobile film under free-standing conditions. By observation of the refractive index change induced by a laser pulse, contraction of the film was observed on the order of several hundreds of ...

We review the recent research on supercooled and glassy water, focusing on the possible origins of its complex behavior. We stress the central role played by the strong directionality of the water-water interaction and by the competition between local energy, local entropy, and local density. In this context we discuss the phenomenon of polyamorphism (i.e., the existence of more than one disord...

The phase transition of crystalline ordering is a general phenomenon, but its evolution in space and time requires microscopic probes for visualization. Here we report direct imaging of the transformation of amorphous titanium dioxide nanofilm, from the liquid state, passing through the nucleation step and finally to the ordered crystal phase. Single-pulse transient diffraction profiles at diff...

The increased use of veterinary antibiotics in modern agriculture for therapeutic uses and growth promotion has raised concern regarding the environmental impacts of antibiotic residues in soil and water. The mobility and transport of antibiotics in the environment depends on their sorption behavior, which is typically predicted by extrapolating from an experimentally determined soil-water dist...

Untargeted metabolomic studies generate information-rich, high-dimensional, and complex datasets that remain challenging to handle and fully exploit. Despite the remarkable progress in the development of tools and algorithms, the "exhaustive" extraction of information from these metabolomic datasets is still a non-trivial undertaking. A conversation on data mining strategies for a maximal infor...

We report that light beams, guided along liquid crystal defect lines, can be transformed into vector beams with various polarization profiles. Using finite-difference time-domain numerical solving of Maxwell equations, we confirm that the defect in the orientational order of the liquid crystal induces a defect in the light field with twice the winding number of the liquid crystal defect, coupli...

The ordering of liquid crystals (LCs) is known to be influenced by surfaces and contaminants. Here, we report that picogram per milliliter concentrations of endotoxin in water trigger ordering transitions in micrometer-size LC droplets. The ordering transitions, which occur at surface concentrations of endotoxin that are less than 10(-5) Langmuir, are not due to adsorbate-induced changes in the...

The production of aureofuscin is very low in the wild-type strain. We attempt to increase the production of aureofuscin by over-expression of a controlling gene in the wild-type strain. Recombinant bacterial strains were constructed by transforming SYAU0709 with an expression plasmid (pBJJ3M) that contained aurj3M, thereby increasing the number of aurj3M gene copies. The fermentation results sh...

In the present work, the effects of chemical reaction on hydromagnetic natural convection flow of Casson nanofluid induced due to nonlinearly stretching sheet immersed in a porous medium under the influence of thermal radiation and convective boundary condition are performed numerically. Moreover, the effects of velocity slip at stretching sheet wall are also examined in this study. The highly ...

Wavelet transformation is one of the most practical mathematical transformations in the field of image processing, especially image and signal processing. Depending on the nature of the multiresolution analysis, Wavelet transformation become more accessible and powerful tools. In this paper, we refer to the mathematical foundations of this transformation.   Introduction: The...