Rapid development around the globe, increase of population and construction with latest megastructures have escalated demand for energy. The increasing ambient outdoor temperature requires mechanical air conditioners to maintain a comfortable environment within building, this contributes high energy consumption. Building good thermal conductivity properties passively reduces This experimental w...

The fascination for hierarchically structured hard tissues such as enamel or nacre arises from their unique structure-properties-relationship. During the last decades this numerously motivated the synthesis of composites, mimicking the brick-and-mortar structure of nacre. However, there is still a lack in synthetic engineering materials displaying a true hierarchical structure. Here, we present...

Nacre-mimetic materials are of great interest, but difficult to synthesize, because they require the ordering of organic and inorganic materials on several length scales. Here we introduce peptoid nanosheets as a versatile two-dimensional platform to develop nacre mimetic materials. Free-floating zwitterionic nanosheets were mineralized with thin films of amorphous calcium carbonate (of 2-20 nm...

This paper contributes to the debate on formalization of artisanal and small-scale mining (ASM) – low-tech, labour-intensive mineral extraction processing in sub-Saharan Africa, drawing fresh insights from Ghana. In early-1990 s, with support GTZ, German technical arm, Ghana implemented its Small-Scale Mining Project (SSMP), an institutional framework designed specifically facilitate legalizati...

Plant identification is the building brick of plant research and development, and is very important for environmental protection and exploration. Usually, the leaves can be easily obtained from a plant and have sufficient visible characteristics for differentiating between their respective plant species. Plant identification is a huge problem that has escaped into neglect for years. Without vis...

We discuss the ill-posed Cauchy problem for elliptic equations, which is pervasive in inverse boundary value problems modeled by elliptic equations. We provide essentially optimal stability results, in wide generality and under substantially minimal assumptions. As a general scheme in our arguments, we show that all such stability results can be derived by the use of a single building brick, th...

In the racemic title compound, C(34)H(22)Br(2)N(2)S·CDCl(3), pairs of diquinoline host mol-ecules form centrosymmetric brick-like dimers utilizing three different aryl edge-to-face inter-actions (EF(1-3)). The dimeric (EF)(6) (i.e. 2 × EF(1-3)) building blocks pack with the deuterochloro-form guest mol-ecules positioned near each of their corners. The Cl atoms of the latter are disordered over ...