Controllable Microparticle Spinning via Light without Spin Angular Momentum.

The spin angular momentum (SAM) of an elliptically or circularly polarized light beam can be transferred to matter to drive a spinning motion. It is counterintuitive to find that a light beam without SAM can also cause the spinning of microparticles. Here, we demonstrate controllable spinning of birefringent microparticles via a tightly focused radially polarized vortex beam that has no SAM prior to focusing.

Risk assessment for the long-term stability of fly ash-based cementitious material containing arsenic: Dynamic and semidynamic leaching.

Fly ash from municipal solid waste incineration (MSWIFA) contains leachable heavy metals (HMs), and the environmental risk of contained HMs is an important concern for its safe treatment and disposal. This paper presents a dynamic leaching test of fly ash-based cementitious materials containing arsenic (FCAC) in three particle sizes based on an innovative simulation of two acid rainfall conditions to investigate the long-term stability of FCAC under acid rain conditions. As well as semi-dynamic leaching test by simulating FCAC in three scenarios.

Associations between Smoking and Smoking Cessation during Pregnancy and Newborn Metabolite Concentrations: Findings from PRAMS and INSPIRE Birth Cohorts.

Newborn metabolite perturbations may identify potential biomarkers or mechanisms underlying adverse, smoking-related childhood health outcomes. We assessed associations between third-trimester smoking and newborn metabolite concentrations using the Tennessee Pregnancy Risk Assessment Monitoring System (PRAMS, 2009-2019) as the discovery cohort and INSPIRE (2012-2014) as the replication cohort. Children were linked to newborn screening metabolic data (33 metabolites).

Optical single-pixel volumetric imaging by three-dimensional light-field illumination.

Three-dimensional single-pixel imaging (3D SPI) has become an attractive imaging modality for both biomedical research and optical sensing. 3D-SPI techniques generally depend on time-of-flight or stereovision principle to extract depth information from backscattered light. However, existing implementations for these two optical schemes are limited to surface mapping of 3D objects at depth resolutions, at best, at the millimeter level.

sp. nov. and sp. nov. isolated from .

Four Gram-stain-positive, facultatively anaerobic, non-motile, non-spore-forming and rod-shaped bacteria (lx-72, lx-45, ZJ784 and ZJ955) were isolated from the respiratory tract or faeces of marmot () from the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau in China. Analysis of the 16S rRNA gene sequences showed that all strains belong to the genus and are more related to CCUG 64069 (95.1-97.

Developing an Online Dashboard to Visualize Performance Data-Tennessee Newborn Screening Experience.

Newborn screening (NBS) is a vital public health program and delays in the screening process can lead to catastrophic outcomes for infants and their families. Efforts to improve screening quality in Tennessee are proactive and ongoing. From these efforts, an open-access dashboard has been developed to address a need for methods to better visualize performance data, promote data transparency, and drive quality improvement.

Optical tweezers study of membrane fluidity in small cell lung cancer cells.

The fluidity of the cell membrane is closely related to cancer metastasis/invasion. To test the relationship of membrane fluidity and invasiveness, we first demonstrated that transfection of small RNA miR-92b-3p can significantly increase invasiveness of the small cell lung cancer cell line SHP77. Then optical tweezers were used to measure membrane fluidity.

Single-pixel spiral phase contrast imaging.

In this Letter, we present single-pixel spiral phase contrast imaging that enables optical edge detection of both amplitude and phase objects. This technique utilizes single-pixel detection to directly acquire the Fourier spectrum of the edge-enhanced object by scanning spiral phase-encoded plane waves in -space. Experimentally, we exploit a digital micromirror device to simultaneously generate the plane wave and reference field for illuminating the object and scan the plane wave for spectrum sampling.

Trapping and Manipulation of Single Cells in Crowded Environments.

Optical tweezers provide a powerful tool to trap and manipulate living cells, which is expected to help people gain physiological insights at single-cell level. However, trapping and manipulating single cells under crowded environments, such as blood vessels and lymph nodes, is still a challenging task. To overcome this issue, an annular beam formed by the far-field Bessel beam is introduced to serve as an optical shield to isolate the target cells from being disturbed.

Conformation and mechanical property of rpoS mRNA inhibitory stem studied by optical tweezers and X-ray scattering.

3' downstream inhibitory stem plays a crucial role in locking rpoS mRNA 5' untranslated region in a self-inhibitory state. Here, we used optical tweezers to study the unfolding/refolding of rpoS inhibitory stem in the absence and presence of Mg2+. We found adding Mg2+ decreased the free energy of the RNA junction without re-arranging its secondary structure, through confirming that this RNA formed a canonical RNA three-way junction.

Optical orbital-angular-momentum-multiplexed data transmission under high scattering.

Multiplexing multiple orbital angular momentum (OAM) channels enables high-capacity optical communication. However, optical scattering from ambient microparticles in the atmosphere or mode coupling in optical fibers significantly decreases the orthogonality between OAM channels for demultiplexing and eventually increases crosstalk in communication. Here, we propose a novel scattering-matrix-assisted retrieval technique (SMART) to demultiplex OAM channels from highly scattered optical fields and achieve an experimental crosstalk of -13.

Orbit-induced localized spin angular momentum in the tight focusing of linearly polarized vortex beams.

Optical spin-orbit interaction has gained much interest recently due to its universality and importance in modern photonics. In this Letter, we theoretically demonstrate that orbit-induced localized spin angular momentum (SAM) conversion can occur in the tight focusing of spin-free linearly polarized vortex beams (LPVBs). By analysis of the polarization states that are associated with the SAM density, we attribute the occurrence of such a conversion to the helical-phase-induced change of local polarization states in the focused field.

Association of newborn screening metabolites with risk of wheezing in childhood.

Background: There are critical gaps in our understanding of the temporal relationships between metabolites and subsequent asthma development. This is the first study to examine metabolites from newborn screening in the etiology of early childhood wheezing.

Methods: One thousand nine hundred and fifty one infants enrolled between 2012 and 2014 from pediatric practices located in Middle Tennessee in the population-based birth cohort study, the Infant Susceptibility to Pulmonary Infections and Asthma Following RSV Exposure Study (INSPIRE), were linked with metabolite data from the Tennessee Newborn Screening Program.

Oscillations of absorbing particles at the water-air interface induced by laser tweezers.

We present an experimental study on oscillation of absorbing particles at the water-air interface. The oscillation is induced by laser tweezers, which are generated with a high numerical aperture objective. When the laser beam is tightly focused at the water-air interface, the optical gradient force attracts the particles to the spot center, and the laser heating of particles results in a strong thermal gradient that drives the particles to leave the spot center.

Dynamic shaping of orbital-angular-momentum beams for information encoding.

Shaping complex fields with a digital micromirror device (DMD) has attracted much attention recently due to its potential application in optical communication and microscopy. In this paper, we present an optimized Lee method to achieve dynamic shaping of orbital-angular-momentum (OAM) beams using a binary DMD. An error diffusion algorithm is introduced to enhance the accuracy for binary-amplitude hologram design, making it possible to achieve high fidelity wavefront shaping while retaining a high resolution.

Aberration compensation for optical trapping of cells within living mice.

Optical tweezers have been used to trap and manipulate microparticles within living animals. When the optical trap is constructed with an oil-immersion objective, it suffers from spherical aberration. There have been many investigations on the influence of spherical aberration when the particles are trapped in a water medium.

Controllable light capsules employing modified Bessel-Gauss beams.

We report, in theory and experiment, on a novel class of controlled light capsules with nearly perfect darkness, directly employing intrinsic properties of modified Bessel-Gauss beams. These beams are able to naturally create three-dimensional bottle-shaped region during propagation as long as the parameters are properly chosen. Remarkably, the optical bottle can be controlled to demonstrate various geometries through tuning the beam parameters, thereby leading to an adjustable light capsule.

Bridging cells of three colors with two bio-orthogonal click reactions.

Cell-cell interactions play a crucial role in the development and function of multicellular organisms. To study cell-cell interactions , it is a big challenge for researchers to artificially build up cell junctions to bridge different types of cells for this purpose. Herein, by employing two orthogonal click reactions, we rationally designed four click reagents , , , and and successfully applied them to bridge cells of three colors.

Fatal Work-Related Injuries: Southeastern United States, 2008-2011.

In 2008, the work-related injury fatality rate was 3.8 per 100,000 workers in the United States but was 5.2 per 100,000 workers for the southeast region.

Calibrating oscillation response of a piezo-stage using optical tweezers.

In optical tweezers, a piezo-stage (PZT) is widely used to precisely position samples for force clamp, calibrating optical trap and stretching DNA. For a trapped bead in solution, the oscillation response of PZT is vital for all kinds of applications. A coupling ratio, actual amplitude to nominal amplitude, can be calibrated by power spectral density during sinusoidal oscillations.

Shaping diffraction-free Lommel beams with digital binary amplitude masks.

Here, we report on experimental observations of various Lommel modes that possess distinct diffraction-free behaviors. The binary amplitude masks are designed to accurately encode the complex field information with the superpixel method. Then, the generation of the desired beams is demonstrated with these binary patterns projected onto the digital micromirrors device (DMD).

Observation of the asymmetric Bessel beams with arbitrary orientation using a digital micromirror device.

Recently, V. V. Kotlyar et al.

Calibration of optical tweezers based on an autoregressive model.

The power spectrum density (PSD) has long been explored for calibrating optical tweezers stiffness. Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) based spectral estimator is typically used. This approach requires a relatively longer data acquisition time to achieve adequate spectral resolution.

Aurora A orchestrates entosis by regulating a dynamic MCAK-TIP150 interaction.

Entosis, a cell-in-cell process, has been implicated in the formation of aneuploidy associated with an aberrant cell division control. Microtubule plus-end-tracking protein TIP150 facilitates the loading of MCAK onto the microtubule plus ends and orchestrates microtubule plus-end dynamics during cell division. Here we show that TIP150 cooperates with MCAK to govern entosis via a regulatory circuitry that involves Aurora A-mediated phosphorylation of MCAK.