Over the past several years, great advances have been made towards novel drug delivery systems. The phenomena of interpolymer interactions and formation of polyelectrolyte complexes have been the focus of intensive fundamental and applied research. Interpolyelectrolyte complexes combine unique physicochemical properties with high biocompatibility. Studies have been carried out on many different...

The Virtual Cell (VCell) is a general computational framework for modeling physicochemical and electrophysiological processes in living cells. Developed by the National Resource for Cell Analysis and Modeling at the University of Connecticut Health Center, it provides automated tools for simulating a wide range of cellular phenomena in space and time, both deterministically and stochastically. ...

Well-ordered, thin oxide films have drawn some attention in recent years as suitable oxide supports for modeling highly dispersed metal catalysts at the atomic scale. It turned out, however, that ultrathin oxide films may exhibit interesting catalytic properties in their own right. In this review, we discuss phenomena specifically connected to ultrathin oxide films to explain and understand the...

Polymer/layered silicate nanocomposites (PLSNCs) offer remarkably improved mechanical and other properties with low inorganic filler loading. The major development in this field has been carried out over the last one and a half decades. However, the authors are far from the goal in terms of understanding the mechanisms of the enhancement effect in the nanocomposites. Continued progress in nanos...

A concise review of relevant experimental observations and modeling of high-pressure tricklebed reactors, based on recent studies, is presented. The following topics are considered: flow regime transitions, pressure drop, liquid holdup, gas-liquid interfacial area and mass-transfer coefficient, catalyst wetting efficiency, catalyst dilution with inert fines, and evaluation of tricklebed models ...

Throughout the 1970s, controversy centered both on immunoassay "sensitivity" per se and on the relative sensitivities of labeled antibody (Ab) and labeled analyte methods. Our theoretical studies revealed that RIA sensitivities could be surpassed only by the use of very high-specificity nonisotopic labels in "noncompetitive" designs, preferably with monoclonal antibodies. The time-resolved fluo...

Chemical reacting systems involve phenomena that span several orders of magnitude in time and length scales, from the molecular to the macroscopic. To account for the multiscale character of these processes, many papers have adopted a simulation architecture that employs coupled simulation codes, in which each code simulates the physicochemical phenomena for a different range of length scales i...

During cheese processing and ripening, bacteria develop as colonies. Substrates and metabolites must then diffuse either from or into the colonies. Exploring how the inner cells of the colony access the substrates or get rid of the products leads to study the diffusion of solutes inside bacterial colonies immobilized in cheese. Diffusion limitations of substrates within the bacterial colony cou...

2 'Human language is based on an elementary property that also seems to be biologically isolated: the property of discrete infinity.'-Noam Chomsky (2000:3) 0.1 Introduction 'Discrete infinity' refers to the property by which language constructs from a few dozen discrete elements an infinite variety of expressions of thought, imagination and feeling. The property 'seems to be biologically isolat...