Membranes are often damaged by freezing and/or dehydration, and this damage may be reduced by solutes. In many cases, these phenomena can be explained by the physical behavior of membrane-solute-water systems. Both solutes and membranes reduce the freezing temperature of water, although their effects are not simply additive. The dehydration of membranes induces large mechanical stresses in the ...

The stability of the geometry of the superconducting coils is essential to the field homogeneity of the LHC dipole magnets. Mechanical stresses during coil assembly, thermal stresses during cool-down and electromagnetic stresses during operation are the sources of deformations of the coil geometry. Additional sources of field-shape errors are the dimensional tolerances of the magnet components ...

As with the consolidation time, the cooling rate applied during the solidification stage of the composite processing cycle influences the total processing cycle time, as well as the mechanical performance. By controlling the solidification rate, changes in the matrix morphology and crystallinity can be achieved, and hence different mechanical properties may be obtained. Control of the solidific...

Mechanical and kinematical aligning techniques are the usual positioning methods during total knee arthroplasty. However, alteration of the physiological joint line and unbalanced medio-lateral load distribution are considered disadvantages in the mechanical and kinematical techniques, respectively. The aim of this study was to analyse the influence of the joint line on the strain and stress di...

Hypertension increases mechanical force on the arterial wall by as much as 30%, resulting in marked alterations in signal transductions and gene expression in vascular smooth muscle cells (VSMCs) that contribute to matrix protein synthesis, cell proliferation, and differentiation. How the mechanical stimuli are converted into a biological signal in cells has yet to be studied. We investigated t...

OBJECTIVE To elucidate how mechanical stresses that are applied to the whole organism are transmitted to individual cells and transduced into a biochemical response. DESIGN In this article, we describe fundamental design principles that are used to stabilize the musculoskeletal system at many different size scales and show that these design features are embodied in one particular form of arch...

a r t i c l e i n f o Increasing use of diffraction methods to study preferred orientation of minerals has established that quartz in deformed rocks not only displays characteristic c-axis orientation patterns, but that there is also generally a distinct difference in the orientation of positive and negative rhombs. In the trigonal quartz crystal structure positive and negative rhombs are struc...