Taylor’s swimming sheet is a classical model of microscale propulsion and pumping. Many biological fluids and substances are fibrous, having a preferred direction in their microstructure; for example, cervical mucus is formed of polymer molecules which create an oriented fibrous network. Moreover, suspensions of elongated motile cells produce a form of active oriented matter. To understand how ...

Hard processes with polarized nucleon beams enable us to study spin-dependent dynamics of QCD and the spin structure of nucleon. The helicity distribution ∆q(x) of quarks within nucleon has been measured in polarized DIS experiments, and ∆G(x) of gluons has also been estimated from the scaling violations of them. On the other hand, the transversity distribution δq(x), i.e. the distribution of t...

The foliations studied in this paper have transverse geometry modeled on a homogeneous space G/H with transition functions given by the left action of G. It is shown that the characteristic classes for such a foliation are determined by invariants of a certain flat bundle. This is used to prove that when G is semisimple, the characteristic classes are rigid under smooth deformations, extending ...

We show that photorefractive waveguide devices are subject to a limitation on their holographic storage capability owing to transversely nonuniform nonlinear losses to evanescent and radiation modes.

The analysis of a new viscometer that takes the form of an oscillating plate, fabricated from silicon using the methods of micro-electro-mechanical-systems (MEMS) is considered. The instrument is designed principally for experimental use in the oil industry. The plate is 1.6mm wide, 2.4mm long, and 20μm thick. It is suspended from a 0.4mm thick support by 48 square cross-section legs, each of l...

Fingernails are a characteristic feature of primates, and are composed of three layers of the fibrous composite keratin. This study examined the structure and fracture properties of human fingernails to determine how they resist bending forces while preventing fractures running longitudinally into the nail bed. Nail clippings were first torn manually to examine the preferred crack direction. Ne...