Polymer‐Induced Surface Modifications of Pd‐based Thin Films Leading to Improved Kinetics in Hydrogen Sensing and Energy Storage Applications

The catalytic properties of Pd alloy thin films are enhanced by a thin sputtered PTFE coating, resulting in profound improvements in hydrogen adsorption and desorption in Pd‐based and Pd‐catalyzed hydrogen sensors and hydrogen storage materials. The remarkably enhanced catalytic performance is attributed to chemical modifications of the catalyst surface by the sputtered PTFE leading to a possible change in the binding strength of the intermediate species involved in the hydrogen sorption process.     

DNA-catalyzed reactivity of a phosphoramidate functional group and formation of an unusual pyrophosphoramidate linkage

During in vitro selection for DNA-catalyzed lysine reactivity, we identified a deoxyribozyme that instead catalyzes nucleophilic attack of a phosphoramidate functional group at a 5'-triphosphate-RNA, forming an unusual pyrophosphoramidate (N-P(V)-O-P(V)) linkage. This finding highlights the relatively poor nucleophilicity of nitrogen using nucleic acid catalysts, indicating a major challenge for future experimental investigation.     

Lanthanides Mediated Oxidative Cross Coupling of Benzylalcohol and Various Amines to Form Corresponding Imines

Herein, a new and efficient approach towards the oxidative cross‐coupling of benzylalcohol and various aromatic amines to form corresponding imines with high degree conversion (>80 %) and chemo‐selectivity using lanthanide salts as pre‐catalysts is presented. The catalyzed oxidative cross‐coupling reaction using La(NO₃)₃ · 6H₂O as pre‐catalyst displayed a broad substrate scope. The reaction afforded various substituted imines from the reaction of benzylalcohol with ample variety of amines in good yields.     

Effect of Initial Wettability on Rock Mechanics and Oil Recovery: Comparative Study on Outcrop Chalks

Surfactant-alternating-gas (SAG) is a favored method of foam injection, in part because of excellent gas injectivity. However, liquid injectivity is usually very poor in SAG. We report a core-flood study of liquid injectivity under conditions like those near an injection well in SAG application in the field, i.e., after a prolonged period of gas injection following foam. We inject foam [gas (nitrogen) and surfactant solution] into a 17-cm-long Berea core at temperature of 90 °C with 40 bar back pressure. Pressure differences are measured and supplemented with CT scans to relate water saturation to mobilities. Liquid injectivity directly following foam is very poor. During prolonged gas injection following foam, a collapsed-foam region forms near the inlet and slowly propagates downstream, in which water saturation is reduced. This decline in liquid saturation reflects in part liquid evaporation, also pressure-driven flow and capillary effects on the core scale. In the collapsed-foam region, liquid mobility during subsequent liquid injection is much greater than downstream, and liquid sweeps the entire core cross section rather than a single finger. Mobility in the region of liquid fingering is insensitive to the quality of foam injected before gas and the duration of the period of gas injection. This implies that at the start of liquid injection in a SAG process in the field, there is a small region very near the well, crucial to injectivity, substantially different from that further out, and not described by current foam models. The results can guide the development of a model for liquid injectivity based on radial propagation of the various banks seen in the experiments.

     

SR-FTIR spectroscopy of renal epithelial carcinoma side population cells displaying stem cell-like characteristics

It is hypothesized that cells with stem cell-like properties may be influential in carcinogenesis, possessing the ability to self-renew, produce differentiated daughter cells and resist environmental or therapeutic injury. This has led to a surge in interest in identifying and characterizing the tumour initiating or cancer stem cell (CSC) with the aim of discovering novel diagnostic and prognostic markers and of understanding the basic biology with the ultimate aim of generating new therapeutic approaches and biomarkers. However, a major hurdle to this process has been the lack of a truly specific cancer stem cell biomarker allied to the rarity of these cells. This has led to problems in characterising these CSCs by traditional '-omic' techniques. Using a renal carcinoma cell line model, we show that synchrotron radiation-Fourier transform infrared (SR-FTIR) spectroscopy is a suitable tool to measure discrete differences in the biochemistry of small numbers of single-cells. Using the chemometric techniques of Principal Component and Linear Discriminant Analysis (PCA and LDA) for multivariate reduction, biochemical differences between the cells from different sub-populations were evaluated. Results found lipid and phosphodiester vibrations to be particularly good discriminating markers in the spectra of these stem-like cells, relative to the more differentiated, proliferating cells that make up the majority of the cell population.     

Analytical Study of Giant Fluctuations and Temporal Intermittency

We study analytically giant fluctuations and temporal intermittency in a stochastic one-dimensional model with diffusion and aggregation of masses in the bulk, along with influx of single particles and outflux of aggregates at the boundaries. We calculate various static and dynamical properties of the total mass in the system for both biased and unbiased movement of particles and different boundary conditions. These calculations show that (i) in the unbiased case, the total mass has a non-Gaussian distribution and shows giant fluctuations which scale as system size (ii) in all the cases, the system shows strong intermittency in time, which is manifested in the anomalous scaling of the dynamical structure functions of the total mass. The results are derived by taking a continuum limit in space and agree well with numerical simulations performed on the discrete lattice. The analytic results obtained here are typical of the full phase of a more general model with fragmentation, which was studied earlier using numerical simulations.