Under UV illumination, polymer films can undergo chain scission and contract. Using this effect, tightly focused laser light is shown to develop runaway near-field concentration that drills sub-100 nm pits through a thin film. This subwavelength photolithography can be controlled in real time by monitoring laser scatter from the evolving holes, allowing systematic control of the void diameter. ...

Joints and fractures, common in Ohio glacial tills, often influence shallow ground water flow paths and rates. Environmental site investigations in glacial till and lacustrine sediments should include determination of the glacial stratigraphy and evaluation of the presence, extent, and density of subsurface fractures. The test pit is one approach to directly assess fracturing and stratigraphy. ...

A patient with symmetrical lower lip pits with or without cleft lip or palate is most likely to be the carrier of a dominant gene that causes the syndrome of lip pits and clefts or Van der Woude syndrome. Familial occurrence of lower lip pits and clefts was first described by Demarquay in 1845.1 Watanabe et a12 reviewed some 100 cases in 1951, and Van der Woude delineated the syndrome in 1954.3...

In this work, we present the stabilization of polar step edges along the [010] direction of calcite (10.4) by the presence of a water-soluble organic molecule, namely Congo Red. While characteristic etch pits are observed on the surface in the absence of the additive, no etch pits can be found in the presence of the additive. Using atomic force microscopy, we can directly follow the restructuri...

Mutations in the inositol 5-phosphatase OCRL cause Lowe syndrome and Dent's disease. Although OCRL, a direct clathrin interactor, is recruited to late-stage clathrin-coated pits, clinical manifestations have been primarily attributed to intracellular sorting defects. Here we show that OCRL loss in Lowe syndrome patient fibroblasts impacts clathrin-mediated endocytosis and results in an endocyti...

Defect sites on bone minerals play a critical role in bone remodeling processes. We investigated single crystal hydroxyapatite (100) surfaces bearing crystal defects under acidic dissolution conditions using real-time in situ atomic force microscopy. At defect sites, surface structure-dependent asymmetric hexagonal etch pits were formed, which dominated the overall dissolution rate. Meanwhile, ...

The cellular prion protein (PrPc) is a glycolipid-anchored, cell surface protein of unknown function, a posttranslationally modified isoform of which PrPSc is involved in the pathogenesis of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, scrapie, and other spongiform encephalopathies. We have shown previously that chPrP, a chicken homologue of mammalian PrPC, constitutively cycles between the cell surface and an e...