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Our society takes for granted the high performance aluminium alloys used in aircraft, trains, fast ferries and motor vehicles. This high performance exists thanks to extensive research and development in industry and academia. One part of that research involves studying alloys as they solidify. During solidification, an alloy is a semi-solid “mush”, with properties that will significantly affect the quality of the final solid material. One property of great importance is the formation of ...
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Synchrotron applications such as coherent X-ray diffraction and X-ray photon-correlation spectroscopy require detectors with a very small pixel size. Furthermore, the detector should have a high frame rate, large dynamic range, high detection efficiency and be also radiation hard. The Medipix range of readout chips (Medipix2 and Medipix3), with a pixel pitch of 55 µm, emerged as good candidates to develop a large area detector for the aforementioned applications. However, reducing the pixel ...
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Solid-state materials, particularly those performing useful functions (e.g. zeolites), often form frameworks or cellular structures on the nanoscale1. These frameworks are usually rigid. Liquid crystals (LC), on the other hand, have a capacity to change shape and respond to external stimuli, such as pH or temperature, and offer the prospect of forming responsive cellular structures. T-shaped block molecules bearing three types of mutually incompatible groups (triphilic) were found to ...
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Magnetic recording lies at the heart of many modern electronic devices. The density at which information can be stored is directy related to the size of the magnetic particles within the storage devices. In order to increase the recording density one must reduce the size of the magnetic particles. Unfortunately, there is a problem: the superparamagnetic limit. Below this size, the magnetization can change direction randomly, driven by thermal fluctuations. Heat assisted magnetic recording1 ...
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Despite decades of study, the mechanisms that HIV employs at certain steps of its replication cycle remain relatively nebulous. One such step involves the viral regulatory protein, Rev, whose principal function is to affect the nuclear export of a majority of the viral mRNA transcripts that are produced during infection. Rev achieves the specific transport of the viral RNAs by oligomerizing onto the Rev response element, a highly-structured RNA motif within an env intron. Without such RNA ...
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The proton dependent oligopeptide transporters (POTs) are a large family of integral membrane proteins that use the inwardly directed proton electrochemical gradient to transport small peptides, amino acids and nitrate across cellular membranes in both pro- and eukaryotic cells. Evolutionarily the POT family sits within the much larger Major Facilitator Superfamily (MFS), members of which contain a common structural motif of 12 transmembrane-spanning alpha-helical segments. The human genome ...
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Rhomboids belong to the family of intramembrane proteases that use a catalytic dyad of serine and histidine for proteolysis of substrate transmembrane proteins. Conserved in both prokaryotes and eukaryotes, they regulate diverse cellular processes such as intercellular signalling, parasitic invasion of host cells, and mitochondrial morphology. Their importance in biology provides a strong incentive to understand the mechanism of these unusual enzymes for identification of specific ...
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Diamond is one of the most interesting materials for many applications in engineering, electronics, jewellery, and synchrotron radiation instrumentation. Chemical vapour deposition techniques allow diamond growth on a range of substrates, and in a range of crystalline quality. Nano-crystalline diamond has been proposed for use in biosensors and nanolithography as it can be deposited with sub-µm resolution. X-ray optics made of diamond are almost transparent, very strong, and are subject to ...
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The relentless drive for greater information storage capacity in physically smaller devices has pushed the size of components to scales where quantum mechanical effects become important. To aid such an increase in information density, both the electron spin and charge are exploited in the field of spin transport electronics; hence the portmanteau spintronics. The idea is to combine the characteristics of existing magnetic devices with semiconductor devices in order to realise a new ...
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Spintronic devices make use of the electron spin to store, recall and process data. Examples include the spin-valve read head, which has produced orders-of-magnitude improvements in magnetic data storage densities, and cutting-edge nonvolatile magnetic random access memory. Over the past decade, ferromagnetic (FM) semiconductors have emerged as new candidates for spintronic applications, offering the prospect of combining high density storage and gate-controlled logic in a single material.1 ...
