Quench Hardness Anisotropy of Rhombohedral Crystals. Sodium Nitrate

The effects of quenching temperature and orientation of Knoop indenter on microhardness of cleavage planes of synthetic sodium nitrate crystals are studied for the range of applied loads (20–160 g) in the high load region. Phenomenological approach was followed to obtain an empirical relation connecting Knoop hardness number, orientation, and quenching temperature. Anisotropic indices are also determined. The implications are discussed.     

Characteristic Growth Features and Etching of InBi Single Crystals

The characteristic growth features observed on the top free surface of InBi single crystals grown by the zone-melting method are reported. These features are analysed by stereographic technique and a possible mechanism responsible for the appearance of the characteristic growth features is discussed. A new etchant capable of revealing dislocations inclined to the cleavage plane is also reported.     

Chemical dissolution of calcite cleavages in aqueous solutions of sodium hydroxide

Optical study of isotropic and anisotropic etch rates by controlled chemical dissolution of calcite cleavage surfaces employing aqueous solution of sodium hydroxide at various etching temperatures is presented. The etch rates are found to be independent of etching time. The isotropic etch rates are found to be smaller than anisotropic etch rates, whereas Arrhenius plots yield activation energy for anisotropic dissolution greater than that for isotropic etching. It is also shown from a comparative study of chemical effect of various etchants on calctie cleavages that for a given plane shape of dislocation etch pits the activation energy is constant and independent of etching temperature and etchant concentration and that it is a characteristic of the etchant and not of the crystal.     

Mechanism of chemical dissolution of calcite in lactic acid

Effect of etching time and temperature on morphology of etch pits and etch rates in controlled dissolution of calcite by lactic acid it optically investigated in detail. Arrhenius equation is used to determine activation energy which is observed to change with the morphology of etch pits. Further, an attempt is made to understand the mechanism of dissolution by considering Laidler's theory of heterogeneous catalytic reactions.     

Study of Anticancer Properties of Graphene Oxide–Metal Oxide Composite

Graphene and graphene oxide (GO) have garnered significant attention due to their exceptional properties. GO, enriched with various functional groups such as epoxy, hydroxyl, and carboxylic groups, has exhibited remarkable potential in biomedical applications. The combination of GO with metals has proven to be a promising platform for cellular imaging, with this study focusing on the preparation of diverse hybrids of GO with metal oxides (GO/MO) and their potential as anticancer agents. In this research, GO is functionalized with MOs like TiO₂, Fe₃O₄, and Cu₂O using specific chemical methods and investigated for the anticancer activity for the application as cancer therapeutic agent. The resulting GO/MO hybrids exhibits favorable thermal and mechanical properties. Moreover, their cytotoxicity against human lung cancer cells is assessed in vitro, revealing the promising anticancer activity of GO/MO hybrids. Notably, the GO/Cu₂O hybrid demonstrates particularly high cytotoxicity in human lung cancer cells.     

A unified scheme for flavoured mesons and baryons

The masses of mesons and baryons with various flavour combinations for qˉq, qˉQ, QˉQ, qqq, qqQ, qQQ, QQQ etc. are computed using a confinement scheme based on harmonic approximation with Lorentz scalar plus vector character. The residual two body coulombic interactions and the spin-hyperfine interactions of the confined one gluon exchange effects are perturbatively calculated and added to the confinement energy to get the mass of the hadron. With all the parameters fixed to get ground state masses of hadrons containing like flavour combinations, a parameter free prediction of the leptonic decaywidths of vector mesons and their sizes are being made. Our results on the baryonic and mesonic masses with open flavours and the predictions on the leptonic decay widths are in good agreement with the respective experimental values. Received: 26 February 1998 / Revised version: 1 September 1998     

Growth and Morphological Studies of Anhydrous Diglycine Sulfate Single Crystals

Diglycine sulfate single crystals are grown from aqueous solution by evaporation method. The effect of growth conditions are studied with respect to the perfection and morphology of the crystals. The seed history, growth temperature and pH of the solution are found to bear pronounced effects. The results are reported in the present paper.     

A computational model for non-conserved mature miRNAs from the rice genome

Several computational approaches employ the high complementarity of plant miRNAs to target mRNAs as a filter to recognize miRNA. Numerous non-conserved miRNAs are known with more recent evolutionary origin as a result of target gene duplication events. We present here a computational model with knowledge inputs from reported non-conserved mature miRNAs of Oryza sativa (rice). Sequence- and structure-based approaches were used to retrieve miRNA features based on rice Argonaute protein and develop a multiple linear regression (MLR) model (r² = 0.996, q²_cv = 0.989) which scored mature miRNAs as predicted by the MaturePred program. The model was validated by scoring test set (q² = 0.990) and computationally predicted mature miRNAs as external test set (q²_test = 0.895). This strategy successfully enhanced the confidence of retrieving most probable non-conserved miRNAs from the rice genome. We anticipate that this computational model would recognize unknown non-conserved miRNA candidates and nurture the current mechanistic understanding of miRNA sorting to unveil the role of non-conserved miRNAs in gene silencing.