In a recent Letter [1], Lu et al. claimed to have identified insulating and conductive regions on a highly oriented pyrolytic graphite (HOPG) surface by differences in the surface potential. Because of the reasons given below, the results presented do not give sufficient evidence to support the claims made. (1) The minimum of the force gradient signal corresponds to the contact potential differ...

Achieving stable, long-term performance of implanted neural prosthetic devices has been challenging because of implantation related neuron loss and a foreign body response that results in encapsulating glial scar formation. To improve neuron-prosthesis integration and form chronic, stable interfaces, we investigated the potential of neurotrophin-eluting hydrogel-electrospun fiber mat (EFM) comp...

Metabolic network analysis is an important step for the functional understanding of biological systems. In these networks, enzymes are made of one or more functional domains often involved in different catalytic activities. Elementary flux mode (EFM) analysis is a method of choice for the topological studies of these enzymatic networks. In this article, we propose to use an EFM approach on netw...

An essential first step in investigations of viruses in soil is the evaluation of viral recovery methods suitable for subsequent culture-independent analyses. In this study, four elution buffers (10% beef extract, 250 mM glycine buffer, 10 mM sodium pyrophosphate, and 1% potassium citrate) and three enumeration techniques (plaque assay, epifluorescence microscopy [EFM], and transmission electro...

We introduce in this paper a new face coding and recognition method which employs the Enhanced FLD (Fisher Linear Discrimimant) Model (EFM) on integrated shape (vector) and texture (‘shape-free’ image) information. Shape encodes the feature geometry of a face while texture provides a normalized shape-free image by warping the original face image to the mean shape, i.e., the average of aligned s...

The use of electrostatic force microscopy (EFM) to characterize and manipulate surfaces at the nanoscale usually faces the problem of dealing with systems where several parameters are not known. Artificial neural networks (ANNs) have demonstrated to be a very useful tool to tackle this type of problems. Here, we show that the use of ANNs allows us to quantitatively estimate magnitudes such as t...

RuO2-borosilicate glass composites representing nuclear glasses show a sudden increase in electrical conductivity when the RuO2 content reached concentration of around 1% volume. This percolation threshold is astonishingly low compared to geometrical threshold, i.e. 15%, considering random distribution phases. Herein, electrostatic force microscopy (EFM) analyses were used investigate this anom...

Using CNT network sensors as our working example, we review AFM-based techniques which are used to study and engineer nanoelectronic devices. We have used dc-EFM and ac-EFM to identify the locations and resistances of individual CNTs that are electrically connected in parallel. Next, 5GM and tm-SGM were used to reveal the semiconducting response of each CNT. With the information available in th...