BACKGROUND Early detection and treatment of neuropathy in leprosy is important to prevent disabilities. A recent study showed that the Nerve Conduction Studies (NCS) and Warm Detection Thresholds (WDT) tests can detect leprosy neuropathy the earliest. These two tests are not practical under field conditions, however, because they require climate-controlled rooms and highly trained staff and are...

Maintaining the integrity of the cuticular transpiration barrier even at elevated temperatures is of vital importance especially for hot-desert plants. Currently, the temperature dependence of the leaf cuticular water permeability and its relationship with the chemistry of the cuticles are not known for a single desert plant. This study investigates whether (i) the cuticular permeability of a d...

Group A streptococcus is a strict human pathogen that can cause a wide range of diseases, such as tonsillitis, impetigo, necrotizing fasciitis, toxic shock, and acute rheumatic fever. Modeling human diseases in animals is complicated, and rapid, simple, and cost-effective in vivo models of GAS infection are clearly lacking. Recently, the use of non-mammalian models to model human disease is sta...

Regardless of the material used for the fabrication of microfluidic devices, the sealing of the open microchannels is necessary to produce the final enclosed fluidic paths. In this regard, bonding of lid substrate to the microchannel substrate remains as a critical step in any μTAS fabrication process. In this work, a new low-temperature bonding technique using a patterned wax layer is presente...

The ability of ethanol to dissolve wax compounds, as an alternative to traditional lipid solvents, was investigated for the recovery of cuticular lipids from biomass. The solubilities of fatty esters with carbon chain lengths from 40 to 54 were measured in ethanol over a temperature range of 30–807C. The greatest increase in solubility was observed between 407 and 607C for the long chain waxes ...

The purpose of this paper was to compare physical properties of conventional particleboard bonded with amounts of UF and PMDI resin and to examine the effect of mat moisture content (MC), wax content and platen temperature on their bonding efficiency, as determined by internal bond strength. It was found that PMDI not only gave superior board properties compared with the UF, but the amount requ...

In this study, an artificial neural network model has been developed to predict the characteristics of the disposable wax patterns used in the investment casting process (IC). The selected process parameters were the injection temperature, injection pressure, die temperature and injection time. The responses were the linear shrinkage and surface roughness of the wax patterns. The experiments ha...

Paraffin wax has been exploited in microactuators because it exhibits a volumetric expansion of ∼15%, at around its melting point. In order to nderstand paraffin wax actuation, for the first time, the melting process has been investigated using a combination of analytical modelling (using tefan’s problem and Neumann’s solution), finite element method (FEM) simulations and actuation data from me...