Book Reviews

Unsigned book reviews are by the Book Review Editor.     

Energy transfer between the flavin chromophores of electron-transferring flavoprotein fromMegasphaera elsdenii as inferred from time-resolved red-edge and blue-edge fluorescence spectroscopy

Both a mode-locked argon-ion laser and synchrotron radiation were used as excitation sources to obtain time-resolved polarized fluorescence of the two FAD cofactors in electron transferring flavoprotein fromMegasphaera elsdenii. Red-edge excited and blue-edge detected fluorescence anisotropy decay curves did not contain a fast relaxation process which was observed upon mainband excitation and detection. This relaxation was assigned to homo-energy transfer between the two FAD cofactors. Failure of energy transfer as observed with edge spectroscopy on this protein excludes restricted reorientational motion of the flavins as a possible mechanism of depolarization. From the global analysis of the fluorescence anisotropy decay surface obtained at multiple excitation and detection wavelengths, the distance between and the relative orientation of the flavins could be estimated. The methodology described has general applicability in other multichromophoric biopolymers and has the potential to acquire accurate geometrical parameters in these systems.     

Synthesis and thermal crosslinking of oxazolidine‐functionalized polyurethanes

A new oxazolidine derivative was obtained from phenol, 2‐amino‐2‐methylpropane‐1,3‐diol and paraformaldehyde. The reaction of this novel oxazolidine diol with phenylisocyanate lead to a urethane model compound which can be polymerized thermally by oxazolidine ring opening to give a Mannich bridge structure. Linear segmented polyurethanes were prepared by reaction of different ratios of oxazolidine diol and commercial polyethylenglycol (M_w ～ 400) with 4,4′‐methylenbis (cyclohexylisocyanate) (HMDI, 90% isomers mixture). The polyurethanes were thermally characterized and crosslinked by oxazolidine ring opening to obtain materials which showed improved thermal stability. © 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Polym Sci Part A: Polym Chem 45: 4965–4973, 2007     

Inequalities for a unified family of Voigt functions in several variables

The classical Voigt functions occur frequently in a wide variety of problems in astrophysical spectroscopy, emission, absorption and transfer of radiation in heated atmosphere, and plasma dispersion, and indeed also in the theory of neutron reactions. Here, in the present paper, by applying several known upper bounds for the first-kind Bessel function J _ν (x) given recently by (for example) Landau, Olenko and Krasikov, sharp bounding inequalities are obtained for the unified multivariable Voigt function V _μ,ν (x; y) in terms of the confluent Fox-Wright function ₁ψ₀ and its incomplete variant ₁ψ₀. Connections of the unified multivariable Voigt function V _μ,ν (x; y) with other unifications and generalizations of the classical Voigt function are also briefly pointed out.     

Lagrangian Duality in Set-Valued Optimization

In this paper, we study optimization problems where the objective function and the binding constraints are set-valued maps and the solutions are defined by means of set-relations among all the images sets (Kuroiwa, D. in Takahashi, W., Tanaka, T. (eds.) Nonlinear analysis and convex analysis, pp. 221–228, 1999). We introduce a new dual problem, establish some duality theorems and obtain a Lagrangian multiplier rule of nonlinear type under convexity assumptions. A necessary condition and a sufficient condition for the existence of saddle points are given. The authors thank the two referees for valuable comments and suggestions on early versions of the paper. The research of the first author was partially supported by Ministerio de Educación y Ciencia (Spain) Project MTM2006-02629 and by Junta de Castilla y León (Spain) Project VA027B06.     

Extraction of strontium using an irradiated extraction agent of crown structure

The partition coefficient of strontium upon its extraction from the aqueous solutions of picric acid into chloroform containing DC-18-crown-6, B-15-crown-5 after their exposition to gamma radiation has been studied. A significant decrease of the partition coefficient in the studied range of doses 10–70 kGy was observed. This effect can be attributed to the radiolytic products of chloroform. The radiation destruction as well as dehydrogenation of crown ethers were not observed.     

Advances in constant-velocity Mössbauer instrumentation

A prototype of a programmable constant-velocity scaler is presented. This instrument allows the acquisition of partial Mössbauer spectra in selected energy regions using standard drivers and transducers. It can be fully operated by a remote application, thus data acquisition can be automated. The instrument consists of a programmable counter and a constant-velocity reference. The reference waveform generator is amplitude modulated with 13-bit resolution, and is programmable in a wide range of frequencies and waveforms in order to optimize the performance of the transducer. The counter is compatible with most standard SCA, and is configured as a rate-meter that provides counts per selectable time slice at the programmed velocity. As a demonstration of the instrument applications, a partial Mössbauer spectrum of a natural iron foil was taken. Only positive energies were studied in 512 channels, accumulating 20 s per channel. A line width of 0.20 mm/s was achieved, performing with an efficiency of 80%.     

Study of the spectrum of cherenkov light

It is pessible to study experimentally Cherenkov light spectra in a liquid scintillation spectrometer with colour filters. Cherenkov light spectra of⁶⁰Co,¹⁹⁸Au,¹¹⁵Cd,¹⁴³Ce,¹⁴⁰La,³²P,⁸⁶Rb,⁷⁶As,⁴²K and an external standard were studied in a Packard 3375 type liquid scintillation spectrometer, using 11 various Kodak Wratten filters. The absorption maxima of the filters ware in the 410–796 nm interval.     

Pushing Squares Around

We study dynamic self-reconfiguration of modular metamorphic systems. We guarantee the feasibility of motion planning in a rectangular model consisting of square modules that are allowed to slide along or rotate about one another. That is, we show that any two connected configurations of the same number of modules can be transformed into each other by a sequence of moves so that all intermediate configurations are connected. This settles a conjecture formulated in [6].