Interaction of triton X-100 on silica: A relationship between surface characteristics and adsorption isotherms

Adsorption of Triton X-100 on various silica substrates has been investigated. A number of solids, including a natural quartz, this quartz washed with HCl acid and subsequently heated at 1273 K; two aerosils and one Kieselgel silicas were studied. These solids exhibit surface areas in the range of 5 to 430 m² g^?1. All the Triton adsorption isotherms display an S-shape at the adsorption temperatures studied (298 and 308 K). It has been found that the pretreatments of natural quartz (by water washing, impurities removed by acid and/or high temperature calcination) affect considerably the amounts of TX-100 adsorbed. Measurements of surface composition have been made by X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS) with particular emphasis on the presence of impurities and on the number of OH groups at the surface of the samples. The nature of the surface hydroxyl has also been studied by infrared spectroscopy. Furthermore, the specific number of hydroxyl groups on the surface of the silica samples has been determined by thermogravimetric analysis. Finally an attempt to correlate solid surface characteristics with adsorption isotherms has been developed.     

Continuous and Discontinuous Innovation: Overcoming the Innovator Dilemma

Challenged by competition pressures and unprecedented pace of change, firms can no longer choose whether to concentrate on the needs of today's customers or on the anticipation of those of tomorrow: they must be excellent in both. This requires managing two related balancing acts: on the one side, being excellent in both exploitation and exploration of their capabilities and, on the other side, being excellent in managing both incremental and radical innovation. These balances are critical since exploitation and exploration, on the one side, and incremental and radical innovation, on the other, require different approaches that have traditionally been considered difficult to combine within the same organization. Working on evidence and discussion from the 7th CINet Conference held in Lucca (Italy) in 2006, this Special Section is aimed at contributing to theory and practice on these two complex balancing acts that today represent a hot issue in innovation management.     

Electrospun fibers based on porcine plasma: a rheological and morphological study

Iranian Polymer Journal - The present work focuses on the assessment of the ability of porcine plasma protein (PPP) to be electrospun satisfactorily to form fibre mats, and their rheological and...     

Evidence for a Negative Correlation between Human Reactive Enamine-Imine Intermediate Deaminase A (RIDA) Activity and Cell Proliferation Rate: Role of Lysine Succinylation of RIDA

Reactive intermediate deaminase (Rid) proteins are enzymes conserved in all domains of life. UK114, a mammalian member of RidA subfamily, has been firstly identified as a component of liver perchloric acid-soluble proteins (L-PSP). Although still poorly defined, several functions have been attributed to the mammalian protein UK114/RIDA, including the reactive intermediate deamination activity. The expression of UK114/RIDA has been observed in some tumors, arousing interest in this protein as an evaluable tumor marker. However, other studies reported a negative correlation between UK114/RIDA expression, tumor differentiation degree and cell proliferation. This work addressed the question of UK114/RIDA expression in human non-tumor HEK293 cell lines and in some human tumor cell lines. Here we reported that human RIDA (hRIDA) was expressed in all the analyzed cell line and subjected to lysine (K-)succinylation. In HEK293, hRIDA K-succinylation was negatively correlated to the cell proliferation rate and was under the control of SIRT5. Moreover, K-succinylation clearly altered hRIDA quantification by immunoblotting, explaining, at least in part, some discrepancies about RIDA expression reported in previous studies. We found that hRIDA was able to deaminate reactive enamine-imine intermediates and that K-succinylation drastically reduced deaminase activity. As predicted by in silico analysis, the observed reduction of deaminase activity has been related to the drastic alterations of hRIDA structure inferred by K-succinylation. The role of hRIDA and the importance of its K-succinylation in cell metabolism, especially in cancer biology, have been discussed.     

Photoluminiscent Manganese Nanoparticles from Solid State Polyphosphazenes Organometallic Derivatives

Pyrolysis in air at 800°C of [{NP(OC₁₂H₁₀)}_0.6{NP(OC₆H₄PPh₂·(π-CH₃C₅H₄)−Mn(CO)₂)₂}_0.4] _n (1) in the solid state affords product 2 containing nanoclusters of Mn₂P₂O₇ with sizes ranging from 50 to 90 nm and averaging about 74 nm. The egg-shape of the unpyrolyzed organometallic polymer is retained but with increased particle size after pyrolysis. The pyrolytic material shows near-infrared photoluminescence attributed to the emission of tetrahedral Mn²⁺ embedded in a matrix of Mn₂P₂O₇. The solid-state pyrolysis of organometallic derivatives of polyphosphazenes may be a useful and general route to nano-structured Mn₂P₂O₇. An erratum to this article can be found at     

Valorization of Al slag in the production of green ceramic tiles: Effect of experimental conditions on microstructure and crystalline phase composition

This work reports the results of an investigation aimed at the development of sintered glass-ceramic tiles by the sinter-crystallization of mixtures composed of aluminum slag and reclaimed packaging glass. The thermal behaviors of mixtures incorporating 50 and 60 wt% Al slag were established by differential thermal analysis (DTA). Green compacts were sintered in a temperature range of 800°C-1050°C and then soaked for 10-60 minutes. The mineralogical characterizations of the sintered materials were obtained by X-ray diffraction (XRD). The achieved results indicated that the sintering of aluminum slag and packaging glass reclaimed led to a glass-ceramic material composed mainly of needle-like crystals of wollastonite (CaSiO₃). The bloating of samples during firing was evaluated according to a Cougny predictive diagram. After initial observations and according to bending strength characterizations, sintered tiles prepared from aluminum slag and glassy sand are appropriate for floor pavement and wall covering.     

Open to a Select Few? Matching Partners and Knowledge Content for Open Innovation Performance

The purpose of the paper is to illuminate the costs and benefits of crossing firm boundaries in inbound open innovation (OI) by determining the relationships among partner types, knowledge content and performance. The empirical part of the study is based on a survey of OI collaborations answered by R&D managers in 415 Italian, Finnish and Swedish firms. The results show that the depth of collaboration with different partners (academic/consultants, value chain partners, competitors and firms in other industries) is positively related to innovation performance, whereas the number of different partners and size have negative effects. The main result is that the knowledge content of the collaboration moderates the performance outcomes and the negative impact of having too many different kinds of partners. This illustrates how successful firms use selective collaboration strategies characterized by linking explorative and exploitative knowledge content to specific partners, to leverage the benefits and limit the costs of knowledge boundary crossing processes.     

Recommending multimedia visiting paths in cultural heritage applications

The valorization and promotion of worldwide Cultural Heritage by the adoption of Information and Communication Technologies represent nowadays some of the most important research issues with a large variety of potential applications. This challenge is particularly perceived in the Italian scenario, where the artistic patrimony is one of the most diverse and rich of the world, able to attract millions of visitors every year to monuments, archaeological sites and museums. In this paper, we present a general recommendation framework able to uniformly manage heterogeneous multimedia data coming from several web repositories and to provide context-aware recommendation techniques supporting intelligent multimedia services for the users—i.e. dynamic visiting paths for a given environment. Specific applications of our system within the cultural heritage domain are proposed by means of real case studies in the mobile environment related both to an outdoor and indoor scenario, together with some results on user’s satisfaction and system accuracy.