Poly-l-lysine/Laminin Surface Coating Reverses Glial Cell Mechanosensitivity on Stiffness-Patterned Hydrogels.

Brain tissues demonstrate heterogeneous mechanical properties, which evolve with aging and pathologies. The observation in these tissues of smooth to sharp rigidity gradients raises the question of brain cell responses to both different values of rigidity and their spatial variations, in dependence on the surface chemistry they are exposed to. Here, we used recent techniques of hydrogel photopolymerization to achieve stiffness texturing down to micrometer resolution in polyacrylamide hydrogels.

Trajectories of COPD patients' response to repeated pulmonary rehabilitation programs.

Background And Objective: Pulmonary rehabilitation (PR) is essential in the management of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), but the long-term effects and the outcomes of repeated programs especially in non-responders remain to be clarified. The aim of this study is to evaluate the long-term effect of PR 12 months after and the effect of repeated PR depending on the patient's response to the first PR.

Methods: This is a single center retrospective analysis of COPD patients admitted to two or three PR programs between January 2012 and December 2017, using the 6-min walking distance (6MWD) to determine the functional response to PR.

Precise force controls enhance loudness discrimination of self-generated sound.

Motor executions alter sensory processes. Studies have shown that loudness perception changes when a sound is generated by active movement. However, it is still unknown where and how the motor-related changes in loudness perception depend on the task demand of motor execution.

Structural colours in the frond of .

Blue and near-ultraviolet structural colours have often been reported in understorey plants living in deep shade. While this intense blue coloration is very catchy to the eye of a human observer, there are cases in which structural colours can be hidden either by the scattered light interacting with pigments or because they are found in unexpected positions in the plants. Here, we show that the fronds of produce structural coloration on both the adaxial and abaxial epidermal surface.

Hydrogen-bonding network in anhydrous chitosan from neutron crystallography and periodic density functional theory calculations.

The hydrogen-bonding network in anhydrous chitosan crystal was studied using a combination of neutron crystallography and quantum chemical calculation. The locations of the hydroxyl hydrogen were directly resolved using Fourier omit maps applied to neutron diffraction data, whereas the amino hydrogen atoms were determined based on geometrical optimization using periodic density functional theory (DFT) calculation. Energy optimization of the hydrogen positions based on DFT calculation allowed the measurement of the hydrogen-bond energies.

Strong magnetic field effect on the nucleation of a highly undercooled Co-Sn melt.

High magnetic field is a powerful tool to tune the microstructure and improve the properties of materials. In this report, the nucleation behavior of undercooled CoSn near eutectic alloy under strong homogeneous and gradient magnetic fields have been investigated using glass slag fluxing method in a 12 T superconducting magnet. The mean undercooling of the undercooled melt is not altered by homogeneous magnetic field but depressed by gradient magnetic field.

Instability Pattern Formation in a Liquid Metal under High Magnetic Fields.

Magnetic field can generate interface instability when some liquids are put close to magnetic field. A well-known interface instability is called Rosensweig instability or normal field instability. Here we report that pure liquid Co can be highly undercooled close to its Curie temperature in strong magnetic field with very high magnetization and exhibiting unique morphology instability called the normal field instability.