Synthetic DNA and Biology (Nobel Lecture)

Most of the significant work has been summarized in a number of reviews and articles. In these there was, of necessity, a good deal of simplification and omission of detail…. With the passage of time, even I find myself accepting such simplified accounts. F Sanger^[1]     

Elevation of the glass transition temperature in flexible‐chain semicrystalline polymers

In the idealized two‐phase model of a semicrystalline polymer, the amorphous intercrystalline layers are considered to have the same properties as the fully‐amorphous polymer. In reality, these thin intercrystalline layers can be substantially influenced by the presence of the crystals, as individual polymer molecules traverse both crystalline and amorphous phases. In polymers with rigid backbone units, such as poly(etheretherketone), PEEK, previous work has shown this coupling to be particularly severe; the glass transition temperature (T_g) can be elevated by tens of degrees celsius, with the magnitude of the elevation correlating directly with the thinness of the amorphous layer. However, this connection has not been explored for flexible‐chain polymers, such as those formed from vinyl‐type monomers. Here, we examine T_g in both isotactic polystyrene (iPS) and syndiotactic polystyrene (sPS), crystallized under conditions that produce a range of amorphous layer thicknesses. T_g is indeed shown to be elevated relative to fully‐amorphous iPS and sPS, by an amount that correlates with the thinness of the amorphous layer; the magnitude of the effect is severalfold less than that in PEEK, consistent with the minimum lengths of polymer chain required to make a fold in the different cases. © 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Polym Sci Part B: Polym Phys 45: 1198–1204, 2007     

Pure adaptive search in global optimization

Pure adaptive seach iteratively constructs a sequence of interior points uniformly distributed within the corresponding sequence of nested improving regions of the feasible space. That is, at any iteration, the next point in the sequence is uniformly distributed over the region of feasible space containing all points that are strictly superior in value to the previous points in the sequence. The complexity of this algorithm is measured by the expected number of iterations required to achieve a given accuracy of solution. We show that for global mathematical programs satisfying the Lipschitz condition, its complexity increases at mostlinearly in the dimension of the problem.This work was supported in part by NATO grant 0119/89.     

The electron current to a Langmuir probe in a flowing high-pressureplasma

The electron current to a Langmuir probe in a moving high-pressure plasma has been measured and analyzed. The plasma is an atmospheric-pressure propane flame, and the probe's speed relative to the plasma was varied from 10 ms^-1 to 30 ms^-1. The current is linearly dependent on the speed and appears to be comprised of two components-one driven by diffusion and the other by convection. A model is devised which can be used to measure the electron density. By comparing the density computed from this model to that measured from the ion current, it has been possible to measure the electron mobility in the flame gases. The value obtained by the authors is in good agreement with theoretical calculations found in the literature     

Underbody and ground effects on rotating disc flow: a global scale inviscid study

The flow induced by a finite disc rotating near horizontal ground is considered, including the effects of an underbody. This paper concentrates on determining the shape of the free layer beyond the rim of the disc which is horizontal in the absence of the underbody and ground but forced to deform to ensure that conditions across the layer are satisfied when the underbody or ground is added. The far-field behaviour, the inviscid flow produced by a nominally infinite disc near the ground and the global solution for small ground clearances are considered analytically, and the full problem is posed as an integral problem. This is then solved numerically and analytically. Results are presented for various heights of the disc above the ground and for discs with an axisymmetric underbody present. A universal form is found for the farfield shape (which is controlled by entrainment into the free layer) but both the underbody and the ground effects are found to increase very significantly for reduced clearances.     

N. Charton,A. Feldermann,A. Theis,M. H. Stenzel,T. P. Davis,C. Barner‐Kowollik,Initiator efficiency of 2,2′‐azobis(isobutyronitrile) in bulk dodecyl acrylate free‐radical polymerizations over a wide conversion and molecular weight range (2004) 42(20) 5170–5179

The original article to which this Erratum refers was published in J Polym Sci Part A: Polym Chem (2004) 42(20) 5170–5179. No abstract.