Flexoelectricity provides a reciprocal relationship between electricity and mechanics in membranes, i.e., between membrane curvature and polarization. Experimental evidence of biomembrane flexoelectricity (including direct and converse flexoelectric effect) is reviewed. Biological implications of flexoelectricity in membrane transport, membrane contact, mechanosensitivity, electromotility and hearing are underlined. Flexoelectricity enables membrane structures to function like soft micro- and nano-machines, sensors and actuators, thus providing important input to molecular electronics applications.
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http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.aca.2006.01.108 | DOI Listing |
Fluids Barriers CNS
January 2025
Adelaide Spinal Research Group & Centre for Orthopaedics and Trauma Research, Faculty of Health and Medical Sciences, The University of Adelaide, Level 7, Adelaide Health and Medical Sciences Building, North Terrace, Adelaide, SA, 5005, Australia.
Background: Traumatic spinal cord injury (SCI) causes spinal cord swelling and occlusion of the subarachnoid space (SAS). SAS occlusion can change pulsatile cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) dynamics, which could have acute clinical management implications. This study aimed to characterise SAS occlusion and investigate CSF dynamics over 14 days post-SCI in the pig.
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January 2025
School of Mine Safety, North China Institute of Science and Technology, Langfang, 065201, China.
The soft-rock roadways in kilometer-deep coal mines are often damaged by large deformation and have to be periodically expanded and repaired, which seriously restricts the safe and efficient production of coal mines. A typical soft-rock roadway in a kilometer-deep coal mine is selected as the engineering, and the main reasons for roadway deformation are analyzed, and the ground stress and mechanical characteristics are obtained. The Flac numerical model, which can accurately reflect the deformation characteristics of surrounding rock in kilometer-deep soft-rock roadway, has been constructed, and the evolution laws of stress field and its damage mechanism have been analyzed with the vertical stress, vertical displacement and plastic zone.
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January 2025
Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of South Carolina, Columbia, SC, 29209, USA.
Accurately predicting the energy consumption plays a vital role in battery electric buses (BEBs) route planning and deployment. Based on the algebraic derivative estimation, we present a novel method to forecast the energy consumption in real time. In contrast to the mainstream machine-learning-based methods, the proposed method does not require access to the historical energy consumption data.
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January 2025
Department of Electrical Engineering, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM, 87606, USA.
Topology optimization is a powerful technique that utilizes the distribution of material properties along with surface topology as parameters to expand a specified performance. While primarily used as a foundational step in regenerative design for structural mechanics, the general TO framework is also applicable to many of the complex issues in electromagnetics such as frequency agile mode converters. This is considered a difficult parameter to optimize since RF components operate on resonance.
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January 2025
School of Chemistry and Physics, ARC Research Hub in Zero-emission Power Generation for Carbon Neutrality, and Centre for Materials Science, Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, QLD, Australia.
Te-free thermoelectrics have garnered significant interest due to their immense thermoelectric potential and low cost. However, most Te-free thermoelectrics have relatively low performance because of the strong electrical and thermal transport conflicts and unsatisfactory compatibility of interfaces between device materials. Here, we develop lattice defect engineering through Cu doping to realize a record-high figure of merit of ~1.
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