Magnesium-substituted calcium phosphate bone cements containing MgO as a separate phase: synthesis and in vitro behavior

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Temperature and length scale dependence of tetraalkylammonium ion-amide interaction

We have studied the temperature and length scale dependence of the energetics of the pair interaction of well-established hydrophobic solutes tetraalkylammonium bromides with hydrophilic formamide (FA) and hydrophobic hexamethylphosphoric triamide (HMPT). Our results do indicate the anomalous length scale dependence of the tetraalkylammonium cation-amide interaction in water. As the cation size is increased, the unfavorable enthalpy of interaction is increased rather linearly until the maximum is reached, after which there appears to be a reversal of the trend. We believe that this phenomenon arises from the impossibility of water to maintain its H-bond network near large tetraalkylammonium cations that leads to the formation of a somewhat disordered solute hydration shell. The energetic cost for overlapping this shell with the amide hydration shell in water is noticeably smaller than that for tetraalkylammonium cations of a moderated size.     

Analytical formula for two‐dimensional ring artefact suppression

Ring artefacts are the most disturbing artefacts when reconstructed volumes are segmented. A lot of effort has already been put into better X‐ray optics, scintillators and detectors in order to minimize the appearance of these artefacts. However, additional processing is often required after standard flat‐field correction. Several methods exist to suppress artefacts. One group of methods is based on minimization of the Tikhonov functional. An analytical formula for processing of a single sinogram was developed. In this paper a similar approach is used and a formula for processing two‐dimensional projections is found. Thus suppression of ring artefacts is organized as a two‐dimensional convolution of `averaged' projections with a given filter. Several approaches are discussed in order to find elements of the filter in a faster and accurate way. Examples of experimental datasets processed by the proposed method are considered.     

Size and Structure of Empty and Filled Nanocontainer Based on Peptide Dendrimer with Histidine Spacers at Different pH

Novel peptide dendrimer with Lys-2His repeating units was recently synthesized, studied by NMR (Molecules, 2019, 24, 2481) and tested as a nanocontainer for siRNA delivery (Int. J. Mol. Sci., 2020, 21, 3138). Histidine amino acid residues were inserted in the spacers of this dendrimer. Increase of their charge with a pH decrease turns a surface-charged dendrimer into a volume-charged one and should change all properties. In this paper, the molecular dynamics simulation method was applied to compare the properties of the dendrimer in water with explicit counterions at two different pHs (at normal pH with neutral histidines and at low pH with fully protonated histidines) in a wide interval of temperatures. We obtained that the dendrimer at low pH has essentially larger size and size fluctuations. The electrostatic properties of the dendrimers are different but they are in good agreement with the theoretical soft sphere model and practically do not depend on temperature. We have shown that the effect of pairing of side imidazole groups is much stronger in the dendrimer with neutral histidines than in the dendrimer with protonated histidines. We also demonstrated that the capacity of a nanocontainer based on this dendrimer with protonated histidines is significantly larger than that of a nanocontainer with neutral histidines.     

Post's Problem for Reducibilities of Bounded Complexity

In this paper we consider the we known method by E. Post of solving the problem of construction of recursively enumerable sets that have a degree intermediate between the degrees of recursive and complete sets with respect to a given reducibility. Post considered reducibilities ≤_m, ≤_btt, ≤_tt and ≤_T and solved the problem for al of them except ≤_T. Here we extend Post's original method of construction of incomplete sets onto two wide classes of sub‐Turing reducibilities what were studying in [1, 2].     

Effect of nano-carbon dispersions on signal in silicon-based sensor structure with photoelectrical transducer principle

We identified different nano-carbon species such as graphene nanoplatelets, graphite flakes and carbon nanotubes dispersed in N-methyl-2-pyrrolidone using a novel sensor structure based on a “deep” silicon barrier working as a photoelectrical transducer. Each nano-carbon particle has specific signature in both 2D photocurrent distribution and photocurrent dependencies on bias changing surface band-bending. Additionally, all nano-carbon particles have characteristic features in the time-dependent evolution of photocurrent. The obtained results can be explained by the influence of nano-carbon molecules' local electric field on the recombination parameters of defect centers on the silicon surface.     

Geometrically Constrained Walls in Two Dimensions

We address the effect of extreme geometry on a non-convex variational problem, motivated by studies on magnetic domain walls trapped by thin necks. The recent analytical results of Kohn and Slastikov (Calc. Var. Partial Differ. Equ. 28:33–57, 2007) revealed a variety of magnetic structures in three-dimensional ferromagnets depending on the size of the constriction. The main purpose of this paper is to study geometrically constrained walls in two dimensions. The analysis turns out to be significantly more challenging and requires the use of different techniques. In particular, the purely variational point of view of Kohn and Slastikov (loc. cit.) cannot be adopted in the present setting and is here replaced by a PDE approach. The existence of local minimizers representing geometrically constrained walls is proven under suitable symmetry assumptions on the domains and an asymptotic characterization of the wall profile is given. The limiting behavior, which depends critically on the scaling of length and height of the neck, turns out to be more complex than in the higher-dimensional case and a richer variety of regimes is shown to exist.