The short working distance of compound microscope lenses in many cases prevents microelectrode penetrations of cells perpendicular to the cell surface. Bending electrodes very near their tips removes this constraint. A method is described for bending glass microelectrodes with a hot filament while their tips are immersed in a water drop. Immersion protects the fine electrode tips from the heat ...

We present an improved method for fabricating tungsten STM tips for measuring nanoscale objects using a multiprobe STM. The tips were prepared by a 'drop-off' technique combined with a magnetic field. For magnetic field strengths above 150 Oe the electrolyte was seen to rotate about the tungsten anode. This rotation reduced the adhesion of bubbles and led to a reduction in the cone angle of the...

We report an in situ method of preparing tips for scanning probe microscopy (SPM). Oriented single-crystal nickel oxide (NiO) rods were diced, using a wafer saw, to prepare artificial breaking points. Two geometries, a single rod and a two-sided cut rod were fabricated. The cleavable tips were mounted to a force sensor based on a quartz tuning fork and cleaved using the coarse approach of the S...

User-generated reviews are a key driving force behind some of the leading websites, such as Amazon, TripAdvisor, and Yelp. Yet, the proliferation of user reviews in such sites also poses an information overload challenge: many items, especially popular ones, have a large number of reviews, which cannot all be read by the user. In this work, we propose to extract short practical tips from user r...

Scanning tunneling microscopes (STM) are used extensively for studying and manipulating matter at the atomic scale. In spite of the critical role of the STM tip, procedures for controlling the atomic-scale shape of STM tips have not been rigorously justified. Here, we present a method for preparing tips in situ while ensuring the crystalline structure and a reproducibly prepared tip structure u...

In location-based social networks, such as Foursquare, users may post tips with their opinions about visited places. Tips may directly impact the behavior of future visitors, providing valuable feedback to business owners. Sentiment or polarity detection has attracted great attention due to its vast applicability in opinion summarization, ranking or recommendation. However, the automatic detect...

the incidence of grapevine virus a (gva) is reported from almost all of the major grapevine growing regions in iran. grapevine is vegetatively propagated by rooting of cuttings or grafting. in such plants, viral diseases are transmitted from stock plants to the progeny. therefore, the control of grapevine viruses can be achieved primarily through production of healthy stock plants. in the p...

In this paper, we propose a method for calculating stress intensity factors of plane fracture problems with cracks by coupling the ®nite element method (FEM) and the direct method of lines. We introduce polygonal arti®cial boundaries and divide the physical domain into two parts: a large domain without any crack tips and small polygonal domains surrounding the crack tips. We solve the problem d...

Two thermally induced phase separation (TIPS) methods have been used to fabricate biodegradable poly(L-lactic acid) (PLLA) tissue engineering scaffolds each with fibrous (F-TIPS) and porous (P-TIPS) microstructures. Three levels of PLLA concentration (3, 5 and 7 wt%) were employed in each fabrication method and both wet and dry specimens were studied. Simple compression testing revealed that an...