Polystyrene with Pendant Mixed Functional Ruthenium(II)‐Terpyridine Complexes

A vinyl substituted 2,2′:6′,2″‐terpyridine and a mixed, bifunctional ruthenium(II)‐terpyridine complex bearing a vinyl and a hydroxymethyl group are utilized as comonomers for radical copolymerization with styrene. The resulting polymers are characterized by means of UV‐vis spectroscopy and gel permeation chromatography, coupled with an in‐line diode array spectrophotometer.     

Modal resonant ultrasound spectroscopy for ferroelastics

Recent experimental and theoretical improvements of resonant ultrasound spectroscopy (RUS) are summarized to investigate elastic constants of phases in shape memory alloys. The proposed inversion procedure, described in this work, is particularly suitable to reliable evaluation of the temperature dependence of elastic constants of low-symmetry ferroelastic materials which may be strongly elastically anisotropic and tend to exist in twinned forms. The method is applicable even for the evaluation of single-crystal elastic constants from RUS measurements on microtwinned crystals, since it involves a homogenization algorithm based on the macroscopic deformation response of the layered structure. This potentially allows performing meaningful acoustic studies on samples with a general submicron-size layered structure.     

Chemoselective N-acylation of indoles and oxazolidinones with carbonylazoles

Unique reactivity: In the presence of more reactive amine and alcohol functional groups and of carboxylic acids, the chemoselective N-acylation of indoles and oxazolidinones is achieved by taking advantage of the unique reactivity of carbonylazole acylating agents with catalytic amounts of 1,8-diazabicyclo[5.4.0]undec-7-ene (DBU).     

Auditory perception of material is fragile while action is strikingly robust

While many psychoacoustic studies have found that listeners can recover some causal properties of sound-generating objects (such as the material), comparatively little is known about the causal properties of the sound-generating actions and how they are perceived. This article reports on a study comparing the performance of listeners required to identify either the actions or the materials used to generate sound stimuli. Stimuli were recordings of a set of cylinders of two sizes and four materials (wood, plastic, glass, metal) undergoing four different actions (scraping, rolling, hitting, bouncing). Experiment 1 tested how well each sound conveyed that it was generated with a different action or material. Experiment 2 measured both accuracy and reaction times for the identification of actions and materials. Listeners were faster and more accurate at identifying the action than the material. Even for the subset of sounds for which actions and materials were equivalently well identified, listeners were faster at identifying the action than the material. These results suggest that the auditory system is well-suited to extract information about sound-generating actions.