Octacalcium phosphate (OCP) is proving to be an important intermediary in the formation of tooth and bone mineral and various pathological calcifications. Before this mineral can form, its solubility product must be exceeded. Thus, a knowledge of its precise values under various conditions is required for a basic understanding of calcification processes. The methodology suitable for measuring t...

Accurate ”first-principle” expressions for the excess free energy Fex and internal energy Uex of the classical one-component plasma (OCP) are obtained. We use the Hubbard-Schofield transformation that maps the OCP Hamiltonian onto the Ising-like Hamiltonian, with coefficients expressed in terms of equilibrium correlation functions of a reference system. We use the ideal gas as a reference syste...

We address a combinatorial optimization problem (COP), namely a particular variant of the matrix chain product problem (MCPP) where the chain involves square dense and triangular matrices. Besides the classical dynamic programming algorithm of cubic complexity, exact greedy algorithms (GA) of linear complexity are also known in the literature. We present in this paper new exact GA’s of linear c...

Carotenoids play an essential role in photoprotection, interacting with other pigments to safely dissipate excess absorbed energy as heat. In cyanobacteria, the short time scale photoprotective mechanisms involve the photoactive orange carotenoid protein (OCP), which binds a single carbonyl carotenoid. Blue-green light induces the photoswitching of OCP from its ground state form (OCPO) to a met...

Spatial pyramid matching (SPM) based pooling has been the dominant choice for state-of-art image classification systems. In contrast, we propose a novel object-centric spatial pooling (OCP) approach, following the intuition that knowing the location of the object of interest can be useful for image classification. OCP consists of two steps: (1) inferring the location of the objects, and (2) usi...

Background: In several conditions we have face cranial bone defects. Reconstruction of these defects remains one of the most challenging problems encountered by craniofacial surgeons. Objective: To evaluate bone repair in cranial bone defects by use of an implant made of octacalcium phosphate in combination with bone matrix gelatin (OCP/BMG). Methods: We used 40, 5–6-week-old male Sprague-Dawle...

If an optimal control problem (OCP) for hybrid systems with autonomous switching is solved by use of the hybrid minimum principle (HMP), it is necessary to apply the HMP to each possible discrete location sequence separately, i.e. the complexity is exponential in the number of switches. To reduce the combinatorial complexity, this paper proposes a graph search algorithm where the graph encodes ...

The Opaque Cover Problem (OCP), also known as the Beam Detector Problem, is the problem of finding, for a set S in Euclidean space, the minimum-length set F which intersects every straight line passing through S. In spite of its simplicity, the problem remains remarkably intractable. The aim of this paper is to establish a framework and fundamental results for minimum opaque covers where S is a...

We have developed a new method for single-drop microextraction (SDME) for the preconcentration of organochlorine pesticides (OCP) from complex matrices. It is based on the use of a silicone ring at the tip of the syringe. A 5 μL drop of n-hexane is applied to an aqueous extract containing the OCP and found to be adequate to preconcentrate the OCPs prior to analysis by GC in combination with tan...

Recent FDA approval of tenofovir-emtricitabine for prevention of human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) as a form of pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) has led to concern about implementation of this strategy. Fifty years ago, a very similar national and international debate occurred when the oral contraceptive pill ("the Pill" or "OCP") was approved. Contentious issues included OCP safety, cost, and ...