Nickel as a chemical modifier for sensitivity enhancement and fast atomization processes in electrothermal atomic absorption spectrometric determination of cadmium in biological and environmental samples.

A systematic study of the efficiency of protons, Ni, Pd and Th as chemical modifiers for the determination of cadmium by electrothermal atomic absorption spectrometry (ETAAS) using fast temperature programs was made for platform atomization. A comparison was made in terms of the salt type, absorbance-time profiles and elimination of the sodium chloride interference. The results were adapted to develop a method for the ETAAS determination of cadmium in biological and environmental samples. The highest sensitivity to determine cadmium in biological and environmental samples was obtained using nickel (together with protons) as a chemical modifier. The accuracy of the method was tested by the determination of cadmium in different certified reference materials. The best detection limit and the characteristic mass of Cd were found to be 0.03 ng mL(-1) and 0.35 pg, respectively.     

Suppression of acoustic noise in the measurements of wall pressure fluctuations

It is shown that, in hydrodynamic noise measurements in the presence of acoustic noise acting upon the pressure fluctuation receiver, spatial filtering methods should provide the best results. Active methods are developed for suppressing the acoustic noise that affects a miniature receiver in the course of turbulent pressure fluctuation measurements. The methods are based on complicating the structure of the measuring transducer by introducing an extra compensating sensing element whose characteristics are identical with those of the main sensing element. The spatial filtering of small-scale turbulent pressure fluctuations by a finite-size electroacoustic transducer is used as the basis for the development of noise-compensated measuring systems, as well as methods of measuring the turbulent pressure fluctuations by receivers with noise compensation. A numerical study of the wave-number filtering of acoustic noise in wall pressure measurements by a noise-compensated receiver is performed.     

Crystallographic report: Crystal structure of 1‐bromo‐1′‐[(2S)‐N‐(1‐hydroxy‐3‐methylbutane‐2‐yl)]‐ferroceneamide

For the unsymmetrical title compound, 1‐bromo‐1′‐[(2S)‐N‐(1‐hydroxy‐3‐methylbutane‐2‐yl)]‐ferroceneamide, two independent molecules were found in the asymmetric unit. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The Value of Bernoulli Polynomials at Rational Numbers

We give a short elementary proof of a result of Almkvist andMeurman [1] on an integrality property of the values taken bythe Bernoulli polynomials at a rational number. We use a lemmaon the divisibility properties of certain binomial coefficientswhich seems to be of independent interest.