Objective: The study aimed at obtaining and characterizing levofloxacin-loaded, poly(ε-caprolactone) electrospun nanofiber formulations to be used as antibacterial wound dressings. Methods: Drug-loaded nanofibers were obtained by the electrospinning process and their morphology was determined using scanning electron microscopy. Structural analysis of the prepared nanofibers was carried out usin...

Correlation clustering is perhaps the most natural formulation of clustering. Given n objects and a pairwise similarity measure, the goal is to cluster the objects so that, to the best possible extent, similar objects are put in the same cluster and dissimilar objects are put in different clusters. Despite its theoretical appeal, the practical relevance of correlation clustering still remains l...

The Learning Parity with Noise (LPN) problem has recently found many cryptographic applications such as authentication protocols, pseudorandom generators/functions and even asymmetric tasks including public-key encryption (PKE) schemes and oblivious transfer (OT) protocols. It however remains a long-standing open problem whether LPN implies collision resistant hash (CRH) functions. Based on the...

Given an n-bit to n-bit MAC (e.g., a fixed key blockcipher) with MAC security ε against q queries, we design a variable-length MAC achieving MAC security O(εq poly(n)) against queries of total length qn. In particular, our construction is the first to break the “birthday barrier” for MAC domain extension from noncompressing primitives, since our security bound is meaningful even for q = 2/poly(...

Solid-Liquid-Gas equilibrium of poly-(ε-caprolactone) – carbon dioxide systems at high pressure has been determined by visual determination of the first melting point using a static apparatus. Measurements have been performed with poly-(ε-caprolactones) of three different molecular weights: 4000 g/mol, 10000 g/mol and 25000 g/mol. The determined SLG equilibrium lines show a temperature maximum ...

Cylindrical elastomers were prepared through the UV-initiated crosslinking of terminally acrylated, 8,000 Da star-poly(trimethylene carbonate-co-ε-caprolactone) and star-poly(trimethylene carbonate-co-D,L-lactide). These elastomers were implanted intramuscularly into the hind legs of male Wistar rats to determine the influence of the comonomer on the weight loss, tissue response, and change in ...