In 3- to 4-day embryonic chick limb buds, a region at the posterior margin of the limb, the zone of polarizing activity, appears to be responsible for signalling positional information along the anteroposterior axis. Our experiments were designed to test which biosynthetic processes are required for polarizing activity. We have treated polarizing regions with biochemical inhibitors, and then as...

The increasing use of TFT-LCDs has generated a great deal of interest in manufacturing defects on TFT-LCD polarizing film because the poor quality of TFT-LCD polarizing film result in undesirable effects on the TFT-LCD display devices. In this paper, we propose a new inspection method that reliably detects various defects of TFT-LCD polarizing films. First, we apply a least mean squares adaptiv...

We show here that bone morphogenetic protein 2 (BMP-2) is involved in patterning the developing chick limb. During early stages of limb development, mesenchymal expression of the Bmp-2 gene is restricted to the posterior part of the bud, in a domain that colocalizes with the polarizing region. The polarizing region is a group of cells at the posterior margin of the limb bud that can respecify t...

Ambitious studies of Earth-like extrasolar planets are outlined in the context of an exploration initiative for a return to the Earth's Moon. Two mechanism for linearly polarizing light reflected from Earth-like planets are discussed: 1) Rayleigh-scattering from a planet's clear atmosphere, and 2) specular reflection from a planet's ocean. Both have physically simple and predictable polarized p...

When a transparent surface is present between an observer and an object, an image reflected by the surface may be superimposed on the image of the observed object. We present a new approach to recover the scenes (layers) and to classify which is the reflected/transmitted one, based on imaging through a polarizing filter at two orientations. Estimates of the separate layers are obtained by weigh...

The role of gap junctional communication during patterning of the chick limb has been investigated. Affinity-purified antibodies raised against rat liver gap junctional proteins were used to block communication between limb mesenchyme cells. Co-injection of the antibodies and Lucifer yellow into mesenchyme cultures demonstrated that communication was inhibited almost immediately. When antibodie...