Effect of Flax By-Products on the Mechanical and Cracking Behaviors of Expansive Soil.

Expansive soils, prone to significant volume changes with moisture fluctuations, challenge engineering infrastructure due to their swelling and shrinking. Traditional stabilization methods, including mechanical and chemical treatments, often have high material and environmental costs. This study explores fibrous by-products of flax processing, a sustainable alternative, for reinforcing expansive clay soil.

Long-term tracing of individual human neural cells using multiphoton microscopy and photoconvertible polymer capsules.

The study of human neural cells, their behaviour and migration are important areas of research in the biomedical field, particularly for potential therapeutic applications. The safety of using neural cells in therapy is still a concern due to a lack of information on long-term changes that may occur. While current methods of cell tracing explore gene manipulations, we elaborate approaches to cell marking with no genetic interference.

Human TRPV1 is an efficient thermogenetic actuator for chronic neuromodulation.

Thermogenetics is a promising neuromodulation technique based on the use of heat-sensitive ion channels. However, on the way to its clinical application, a number of questions have to be addressed. First, to avoid immune response in future human applications, human ion channels should be studied as thermogenetic actuators.

Bright ultra-broadband fiber-based biphoton source.

In this Letter, we report a first, to the best of our knoqledge, experimental realization of a bright ultra-broadband (180 THz) fiber-based biphoton source with widely spectrally separated signal and idler photons. Such a two-photon source is realized due to the joint use of a broadband two-loop phase-matching of interacting light waves and high optical nonlinearity of a silica-core photonic crystal fiber. The high performance of the developed fiber source identifies it as an important and useful tool for a wide range of optical quantum applications.

Preparation and characterization of inactivated tick-borne encephalitis virus samples for single-particle imaging at the European XFEL.

X-ray imaging of virus particles at the European XFEL could eventually allow their complete structures to be solved, potentially approaching the resolution of other structural virology methods. To achieve this ambitious goal with today's technologies, about 1 ml of purified virus suspension containing at least 10 particles per millilitre is required. Such large amounts of concentrated suspension have never before been obtained for enveloped viruses.