STUDY OBJECTIVES To document the current practice of occupational asthma (OA) diagnosis and use of specific inhalation challenge (SIC). DESIGN, SETTING, AND PARTICIPANTS A survey evaluating the current practice of SIC was mailed to 259 residency training programs in adult pulmonary diseases, allergy and immunology, and occupational medicine accredited in the United States and Canada during th...

Streptococcal inhibitor of complement (SIC) is a highly polymorphic extracellular protein and putative virulence factor secreted by M1 and M57 strains of group A Streptococcus (GAS). The sic gene is highly upregulated in invasive M1T1 GAS isolates following selection of mutations in the covR/S regulatory locus in vivo. Previous work has shown that SIC (allelic form 1.01) binds to and inactivate...

Nanotechnology, shortened to nanotech, is the study of the controlling of matter on an atomic and molecular scale. Generally, nanotechnology deals with structures sized between 1 to 100 nanometer in at least one dimension and involves developing materials or devices within that size. The use of nanotechnology in the field of pharmaceutics and drug delivery has grown over the last few years, so ...

We performed STM-ENDOR experiments where the intensity of one of the hyperfine components detected in ESR-STM is recorded while an rf power is irradiated into the tunneling junction and its frequency is swept. When the latter frequency is near a nuclear transition a dip in ESR-STM signal is observed. This experiment was performed in three different systems: near surface SiC vacancies where the ...

Dense silicon carbide (SiC) matrix composites with SiC whiskers and particles as reinforcement were prepared by infiltrating molten Si at 1550 °C into porous preforms composed of pyrolysed rice husks (RHs) and extra added SiC powder in different ratios. The Vickers hardness of the composites showed an increase from 18.6 to 21.3 GPa when the amount of SiC added in the preforms was 20% (w/w), and...

Microcantilever motion detection is a useful tool for the characterization of the physical, chemical and biological properties of materials. In the past, different approaches have been proposed and tested to enhance the behavior, size and simplicity of microcantilever motion detectors. In this paper, a new approach to measure microcantilever motion with nanometric resolution is presented. The p...

We present, in this paper the mathematical approach for optimization nanometric thickness of the SiGeC base heterojunction bipolar transistors (HBTs), realized in BiCMOS industrial process. However, use of these components in applications microwave radio frequencies implores the use of complex structures shrinking. The base SiGeC is the active part of the transistor, the optimization of the nan...

Different polytypes (α-SiC and β-SiC) and crystallographic orientations ((0001) and (11-20) of 6H-SiC) have been used in order to elaborate Silicon Carbide (SiC) nanopillars using inductively coupled plasma etching method. The cross section of the SiC pillars shows a rhombus, pentagon, or hexagonal morphology depending on polytypes and crystallographic orientations. The favored morphologies of ...

The cluster-expansion method was used to perform first principles phase diagram calculations for the wurtzite-structure quasibinary systems (SiC)1 X(AlN)X, (SiC)1 X (GaN)X and (SiC)1 X(InN)X; and to model variations of band gaps as functions of bulk compositions and temperature. In SiC-AlN, plane wave pseudopotential formation-energy calculations predict low-energy metastable states with format...