The effect of dextran nanoparticles on the conformation and compaction of single DNA molecules confined in a nanochannel was investigated with fluorescence microscopy. It was observed that the DNA molecules elongate and eventually condense into a compact form with increasing volume fraction of the crowding agent. Under crowded conditions, the channel diameter is effectively reduced, which is in...

Early results from the Alcator C-Mod tokamak indicate that ohmic energy confinement does not obey the Neo-Alcator scaling. Instead 'Ohmic L-mode' confinement, close to ITER89-P, is obtained, which substantially exceeds Neo-Alcator under some circumstances. ICRF-heated plasmas follow the same scaling. H-modes are observed both in ohmic and ICRF heated plasmas, with confinement enhancements of ab...

This study investigated the role of heading recency interacting with heading frequency in determining neuropsychological deficits associated with heading the ball during soccer play. Sixty-four high-ability male soccer players ages 16 to 34 completed the California Verbal Learning Test (CVLT), the Trailmaking Test, the Paced Auditory Serial Addition Test (PASAT), the Facial Recognition Test, th...

The liquid crystalline model biomembrane system consisting of a stack of interacting membranes is studied in the realistic soft confinement regime by the newly developed Fourier Monte Carlo simulation technique. In this regime experiment and simulations show that the functional form of the fluctuation pressure is more nearly exponential rather than the power law valid for the hard confinement r...

Generally, phase transitions are seriously affected by spatial confinement. This effect is important for its own sake, but also for applications to nanotechnology. Here we report the first systematic experimental study on confinement effects on a liquid-liquid transition of a molecular liquid. We found that one liquid can be transformed into another purely by spatial confinement. This indicates...

We optimized potential parameters in a molecular dynamics model to reproduce the experimental contact angle of a macroscopic mercury droplet on graphite. With the tuned potential, we studied the effects of pore size, geometry, and temperature on the wetting of mercury droplets confined in organic-rich shale nanopores. The contact angle of mercury in a circular pore increases exponentially as po...

Controlling chemical reactions within a small space is a significant issue in chemistry, and methods to induce reactions within a desired position have various potential applications. Here we demonstrate localized, efficient photopolymerization by radiation pressure. We induced a one-photon UV polymerization of liquid acrylate solutions in the optical-trapping potential of a focused near-IR (NI...

Humans perceive heading accurately when they rotate their eyes. This is remarkable, because (1) the pursuit eye movement makes the retinal flow more complicated; and (2) the eye rotation causes a continuous change of the heading direction on the retina. The first problem prevents a simple association of the centre of flow on the retina with the heading direction. To solve it, the brain needs to...

Strong dense many-spin interactions have been proposed to organize novel orbital dynamics (the Little Effect) for novel chemical and catalytic phenomena. The recent determinations of the relativistic and quantum Hall effects of carriers in graphene under strong magnetic confinement have substantiated the Little Effect. Moreover such nonclassical phenomena under the stronger magnetic confinement...