Corrigendum to “Convergence of invariant measures for singular stochastic diffusion equations” [Stochastic Process. Appl. 122 (2012) 1998–2017]

We correct a few errors that appeared in [Convergence of invariant measures for singular stochastic diffusion equations, Stochastic Process. Appl. 122 (4) (2012) 1998–2017] by I. Ciotir and J.M. Tölle.     

Laser ablation ICP-MS for quantitative biomedical applications

LA-ICP-MS allows precise, relatively fast, and spatially resolved measurements of elements and isotope ratios at trace and ultratrace concentration levels with minimal sample preparation. Over the past few years this technique has undergone rapid development, and it has been increasingly applied in many different fields, including biological and medical research. The analysis of essential, toxic, and therapeutic metals, metalloids, and nonmetals in biomedical tissues is a key task in the life sciences today, and LA-ICP-MS has proven to be an excellent complement to the organic MS techniques that are much more commonly employed in the biomedical field. In order to provide an appraisal of the fast progress that is occurring in this field, this review critically describes new developments for LA-ICP-MS as well as the most important applications of LA-ICP-MS, with particular emphasis placed on the quantitative imaging of elements in biological tissues, the analysis of heteroatom-tagged proteins after their separation and purification by gel electrophoresis, and the analysis of proteins that do not naturally have ICP-MS-detectable elements in their structures, thus necessitating the use of labelling strategies.     

Deposition of titanium nitride and hydroxyapatite-based biocompatible composite by reactive plasma spraying

Titanium nitride is a bioceramic material successfully used for covering medical implants due to the high hardness meaning good wear resistance. Hydroxyapatite is a bioactive ceramic that contributes to the restoration of bone tissue, which together with titanium nitride may contribute to obtaining a superior composite in terms of mechanical and bone tissue interaction matters.The paper presents the experimental results in obtaining composite layers of titanium nitride and hydroxyapatite by reactive plasma spraying in ambient atmosphere. X-ray diffraction analysis shows that in both cases of powders mixtures used (10% HA + 90% Ti; 25% HA + 75% Ti), hydroxyapatite decomposition occurred; in variant 1 the decomposition is higher compared with the second variant. Microstructure of the deposited layers was investigated using scanning electron microscope, the surfaces presenting a lamellar morphology without defects such as cracks or microcracks. Surface roughness values obtained vary as function of the spraying distance, presenting higher values at lower thermal spraying distances.     

Source motion detection, estimation, and compensation for underwater acoustics inversion by wideband ambiguity lag-Doppler filtering

Acoustic channel properties in a shallow water environment with moving source and receiver are difficult to investigate. In fact, when the source-receiver relative position changes, the underwater environment causes multipath and Doppler scale changes on the transmitted signal over low-to-medium frequencies (300 Hz-20 kHz). This is the result of a combination of multiple paths propagation, source and receiver motions, as well as sea surface motion or water column fast changes. This paper investigates underwater acoustic channel properties in a shallow water (up to 150 m depth) and moving source-receiver conditions using extracted time-scale features of the propagation channel model for low-to-medium frequencies. An average impulse response of one transmission is estimated using the physical characteristics of propagation and the wideband ambiguity plane. Since a different Doppler scale should be considered for each propagating signal, a time-warping filtering method is proposed to estimate the channel time delay and Doppler scale attributes for each propagating path. The proposed method enables the estimation of motion-compensated impulse responses, where different Doppler scaling factors are considered for the different time delays. It was validated for channel profiles using real data from the BASE'07 experiment conducted by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization Undersea Research Center in the shallow water environment of the Malta Plateau, South Sicily. This paper provides a contribution to many field applications including passive ocean tomography with unknown natural sources position and movement. Another example is active ocean tomography where sources motion enables to rapidly cover one operational area for rapid environmental assessment and hydrophones may be drifting in order to avoid additional flow noise.     

Reactive dienes: intramolecular aromatic oxidation of 3-(2-hydroxyphenyl)-propionic acids

[reaction: see text] Treatment of 3-(2-hydroxyphenyl)-propionic acids with a hypervalent iodine reagent in the presence of a dienophile initiates a tandem intramolecular aromatic oxidation/Diels-Alder reaction. Herein we report (1) investigations on the scope and limitations of this novel reaction combination and (2) preliminary diastereoselectivity studies using alpha- and beta-substituted acids.     

Raman, surface enhanced Raman spectroscopy, and DFT calculations: a powerful approach for the identification and characterization of 5-fluorouracil anticarcinogenic drug species

The normal Raman and SERS spectra of 5-fluorouracil (5-FU) in water solution and attached to a biological artificial model (a silver colloid) at different pH values were recorded and discussed. The DFT calculation results helped us to establish for the first time the most stable resonance structure for each of the tautomeric forms (i.e., two enol and two enolate forms) and to interpret the Raman and SERS spectra. At alkaline pH, both deprotonated forms of 5-FU were found to be present in solution and to adsorb on the Ag surface in a perpendicular orientation or an orientation not significantly tilted from the surface normal. The N3-deprotonated form seems to be the dominant tautomer in the adsorbed state, more probably attached through the O7 atom. At acid pH values, the N3-deprotonated form was again found to be the mainly chemisorbed species adopting a similar orientation. The combination of these two approaches (i.e., the theoretical and experimental one) proved to be a viable candidate for inclusion in a rapid, sensitive biological method of detecting and studying such essential anticarcinogenic species or biological threats in different conditions.     

Thermal investigations of nickel–zinc ferrites formation from malate coordination compounds

Nickel–zinc ferrites have been synthesized via thermal decomposition of polynuclear coordination compounds containing as ligand the anion of malic acid, namely (NH₄)[Fe₂NixZn_1–x(C₄H₄O₅)(OH)₃]·nH₂O (x =0.25, 0.5 and 0.75, n=3 and 5). A comparison between the thermal behaviour of the studied polynuclear coordination compounds is inferred. Fe₂NixZn_1–xO₄ (n=0.25, 0.5 and 0.75) ferrites with mean particle sizes of 65–85 Å and free from other phases are formed after a heating treatment of only one hour at 500°C.