Pseudotachylyte, a fault rock formed through coseismic frictional melting, provides an important record of coseismic mechanics. In particular, injection veins formed at a high angle to the fault surface have been used to estimate rupture directivity, velocity, pulse length, stress and strength drop, as well as slip weakening distance and wall rock sti ness. These studies, however, have generall...

Chronic pulmonary hypertension in infancy and childhood is characterized by a fixed and progressive increase in pulmonary arterial pressure and resistance, pulmonary arterial remodeling, and right ventricular hypertrophy and systolic dysfunction. These abnormalities are replicated in neonatal rats chronically exposed to hypoxia from birth in which increased activity of Rho-kinase (ROCK) is crit...

Fluid migration and distribution are important aspects of the evolution of sedimentary basins. An essential parameter affecting fluid flow is permeability. Even mm thick fractures have permeabilit ies many orders of magnitude above surrounding sediments, and thus have the potential of focusing fluid flow. It is a major task to establish the importance of these fractures as fluid conduits. One a...

Abundant steeply-dipping thick coal seams (SDTCS) have been found in Xinjiang, China, and they are mined largely by the horizontal section top-coal caving (HSTCC) method. The hanging wall of the HSTCC face is nearly vertical and does not fracture easily after the underlying coal is extracted. As a result, stress tends to concentrate in the hanging wall of the lower-section working face (LSWF) a...

Wall displacements and ground pressure acting on the lining of a tunnel increase with time. These time-dependent deformations are both due to face advance effect and to the time-dependent behavior of the rock mass.  Viscoelastic materials exhibit both viscous and elastic behaviors. Thorough this study, the effect of different linear viscoelastic models including Maxwell, Kelvin and Kelvin-Voigt...

A rock mass is a material quite different from other structural materials used in civil engineering. It is heterogeneous and quite often discontinuous, but is one of the materials in the earth's crust, which is most used in man's construction. Ideally, a rock mass is composed of a system of rock blocks and fragments separated by discontinuities forming a material in which all elements behave in...

rock slope stability depends very much on the strength features of the rock and the geometrical and strength characteristics of the discontinuities (e.g., roughness, wall strength and persistence). since a rock mass is not a continuum, its behavior is dominated by such discontinuities as faults, joints and bedding planes. also, rock slope instability is a major hazard for human activities and o...

Formation Micro Imager (FMI) can directly reflect changes of wall stratum and rock structures. It is also an important method to divide stratum and identify lithology. However, people usually deal with FMI images manually, which is extremely inefficient and may incur heavy burdens in practice. In this paper, with characteristics of rock structures from FMI images, we develop an efficient and in...

Rock slope stability depends very much on the strength features of the rock and the geometrical and strength characteristics of the discontinuities (e.g., roughness, wall strength and persistence). Since a rock mass is not a continuum, its behavior is dominated by such discontinuities as faults, joints and bedding planes. Also, Rock slope instability is a major hazard for human activities and o...

The RhoA/Rho kinase (ROCK) pathway is a new mechanism of remodeling and vasoconstriction. Few data are available regarding ROCK activation when angiotensin I-converting enzyme is high and blood pressure is normal. We hypothesized that ROCK is activated in the vascular wall in normotensive rats with genetically high angiotensin I-converting enzyme levels, and it causes increased vascular express...