Enhanced wet grip with North American river otter paws.

The semi-aquatic North American river otter (Lontra canadensis) has the unique challenge of navigating slippery algae-coated rocks. Unlike other river otter species, each rear paw of the North American river otter has a series of soft, circular, and keratinized plantar pads similar to the felt pads on the boots of fly fishermen. Surrounding these soft pads is a textured epidermal layer.

Coarse-Grained Force Field Calibration Based on Multiobjective Bayesian Optimization to Simulate Water Diffusion in Poly-ε-caprolactone.

Molecular dynamics at the atomistic scale is increasingly being used to predict material properties and speed up the material design and development process. However, the accuracy of molecular dynamics predictions is sensitively dependent on the force fields. In the traditional force field calibration process, a specific property, predicted by the model, is compared with the experimental observation and the force field parameters are adjusted to minimize the difference.

Hemodialysis blood access flow rates can be estimated accurately from on-line dialysate urea measurements and the knowledge of effective dialyzer urea clearance.

Measurement of blood flow rate (Qa) is used to monitor arteriovenous fistulas and grafts that are used for hemodialysis blood access. Most Qa measurements use indicator dilution techniques to measure the recirculation that is induced by the reversal of hemodialysis blood lines. R plus the dialysis circuit flow (Qb) allows the calculation of Qa.