Thermal oxidation of cellulose investigated by chemiluminescence. The effect of magnesium and calcium carbonates and of different pHs

Whatman cellulose impregnated with calcium and magnesium carbonates was oxidized and chemiluminescence accompanying this oxidation has been measured. It was shown that magnesium ions in deacidified cellulose pulp promote the light emission significantly. On the other hand, acid papers give the more pronounced light signals at temperatures close to ambient. The relation between chemiluminescence runs and paper degradation has been implicated, with an attempt to extrapolate half-lives of paper samples to conditions close to ambient. To cite this article: J. Rychlý et al., C. R. Chimie 9 (2006).     

Recent advances of ultrasonic testing of cement based materials at early ages

To summarize some of the most important findings in the field of ultrasonic (US) testing of early age hydration and formation of structure of different cement based materials (CBMs), a review of literature with focus on US P-wave transmission and S-wave reflection methods is presented in this paper. The review shows a great ability of both US techniques to observe setting phenomena and to determine different milestones during the early age formation of CBM’s microstructure. Clear physical basis, high accuracy, and non-destructive nature of the method indicate that US methods could become standardized in the near future.     

Another characterization of homogeneous Poisson processes

For a general renewal process N (allowing delay, defect and multiple simultaneous arrivals) the independence of the first renewal epochs of the marked processes got from N by Bernoulli 0/1 thinning is characterized. This independence is well-known to hold true in the case of homogeneous Poisson processes; by way of corollary one obtains the interesting observation that, when coupled with some minimal extra conditions, it in fact already identifies them. The proof is analytic in character.     

Phase‐Transfer‐Catalysed Synthesis of Pyrroloindolines and Pyridoindolines by a Hydrogen‐Bond‐Assisted Isocyanide Cyclization Cascade

A cascade reaction that generates pyrrolo‐ and pyridoindoline motifs from isocyanide precursors under phase‐transfer conditions is described. This transformation proceeds at room temperature in the presence of a quaternary ammonium catalyst and base to generate functionalized products containing an all‐carbon quaternary stereocentre. Quantum chemical calculations demonstrated that intramolecular general acid catalysis plays a key accelerating role through stabilization of developing charge in the transition state, and that the reaction is best described as a 5‐endo dig cyclization, rather than an anionic 6π electrocyclization. Investigations employing chiral phase‐transfer catalysts have given promising selectivities to date.     

Water suppression without signal loss in HR-MAS 1H NMR of cells and tissues

In cell and tissue samples, water is normally three orders of magnitude more abundant than other metabolites. Thus, water suppression is required in the acquisition of NMR spectra to overcome the dynamic range problem and to recover metabolites that overlap with the broad baseline of the strong water resonance. However, the heterogeneous cellular environment often complicates water suppression and the strong coupling of water to membrane lipids interferes with the NMR detection of membrane associated lipid components. The widely used water suppression techniques including presaturation and double pulsed field gradient selective echo result in more than a 70% reduction in membrane associated lipid components in proton spectra of cells and tissues compared to proton spectra acquired in the absence of water suppression. A water suppression technique based on the combination of selective excitation pulses and pulsed field gradients is proposed to use in the acquisition of high resolution MAS NMR spectra of tissue specimens and cell samples. This pulse sequence methodology enables efficient water suppression for intact cells and tissue samples and eliminates signal loss from cellular metabolites.     

Cellulose liquefaction in acidified ethylene glycol

Wood pulp cellulose was used in a study of its catalyzed liquefaction in the presence of ethylene glycol, p-toluene sulfonic acid monohydrate or sulphuric acid being the catalysts. For this study, microcrystalline cellulose, Whatman filter paper no. 1 and cotton linters with molar masses of 76,000, 699,000 and 1,910,000 g mol⁻¹, respectively were used. This liquefaction was studied by gravimetric determinations, by X-ray diffraction analysis of the residual cellulose and by monitoring of the molar mass decrease over different time intervals, using size-exclusion chromatography. The disordered regions, even of cellulose with the highest molar mass degraded in the initial minute of liquefaction. However, the highly ordered cellulose regions remained relatively stable for a longer time. None the less, partial degradation of the highly ordered regions of the cellulose was achieved.     

Codimension Two PL Embeddings of Spheres with Nonstandard Regular Neighborhoods

For a given polyhedron K(?)M,the notation RM(K)denotes a regular neigh- borhood of K in M.The authors study the following problem:find all pairs(m,k) such that if K is a compact k-polyhedron and M a PL m-manifold,then R_M(f(K))≌R_M(g(K))for each two homotopic PL embeddings f,g:K→M.It is proved that R_S~(k 2)(S~k)(?)S~k×D~2 for each k(?)2 and some PL sphere S~k(?)S~(k 2)(even for any PL sphere S~k(?)S~(K 2)having an isolated non-locally flat point with the singularity S~(k-1)(?) S~(k 1)such thatπ_1(S~(k 1)-S~(k-1))(?)Z).