Composite materials may be restricted to emphasize those materials that contain a continuous matrix constituent that binds together and provides form to an array of a stronger, stiffer reinforcement constituent. The resulting composite material has a balance of structural properties that is superior to either constituent material alone. Combining the advantages of inorganic and organic componen...

A basic property of life is its capacity to experience Darwinian evolution. The replicator concept is at the core of genetics-first theories of the origin of life, which suggest that self-replicating oligonucleotides or their similar ancestors may have been the first "living" systems and may have led to the evolution of an RNA world. But problems with the nonenzymatic synthesis of biopolymers a...

Low concentrations of synthetic- or bio-polymers in irrigation water can nearly eliminate sediment, N, ortho- and total-P, DOM, pesticides, micro-organisms, and weed seed from runoff. These environmentally safe polymers are employed in various sensitive uses including food processing, animal feeds, and potable water purification. The most common synthetic polymer is anionic, high purity polyacr...

Rheological techniques and methods have been employed for many decades in the characterization of polymers. Originally developed and used on synthetic polymers, rheology has then found much interest in the field of natural (bio) polymers. This review concentrates on introducing the fundamentals of rheology and on discussing the rheological aspects and properties of the two major classes of biop...

Soft X-ray absorption spectroscopy coupled with nano-scale microscopy has been widely used in material science, environmental science, and physical sciences. In this work, the advantages of soft X-ray absorption spectromicroscopy for plant biopolymer research were demonstrated by determining the chemical sensitivity of the technique to identify common plant biopolymers and to map the distributi...

the aim of the present work was to prepare and characterize biopolymer nanocarriers and evaluate their suitability in possible oral delivery of insulin. the egg albumin biopolymer was used to prepare nanoparticles which were further characterized by fourier transformed infrared spectroscopy (ftir), transmission electron microscopy (tem), scanning electron microscopy (sem), zeta potential, dynam...

1) Concentration determination and isolation of purified fractions of natural thiols and natural acid polysaccharides for trace metal complexation and structural experiments. 2) Determination of conditional stability constants for the complexation of selected B metal ions (such as Ag, Hg, Cd, Cu, Pb) to specific thiolic functional groups in estuarine organic matter, and of A (e.g., Cs, Ba, Th) ...

The helix is a ubiquitous motif for biopolymers. We propose a heuristic, entropically based model that predicts helix formation in a system of hard spheres and semiflexible tubes. We find that the entropy of the spheres is maximized when short stretches of the tube form a helix with a geometry close to that found in natural helices. Our model could be directly tested with wormlike micelles as t...

in order to know the environmental behaviour of toxic pollutants it is fundamental to understandthe role of chemical components of a material on sorption of such pollutants.in this study, the sorption of amix of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (pahs) by cork fractions (i.e. raw cork (cf), free extractive cork(fef) and nonsaponifiable (desf)) has been investigated to better understand the role ...

High-resolution Fourier transform nuclear magnetic resonance was used to observe the natural abundance (13)C spectrum of a 0.02 M solution of bovine pancreatic ribonuclease A. Peaks assignable to only three carbons were easily observed after 10 hr of signal averaging. A number of tentative assignments were made. As expected, the (13)C spectrum was appreciably richer in detail than the correspon...