Dye-sensitized solar cells fabricated by using a novel metal-free alkoxysilyl carbazole as a sensitizing dye and a Co(3+/2+)-complex redox electrolyte exhibited light-to-electric energy conversion efficiencies of over 12% with open-circuit photovoltages higher than 1 V by applying a hierarchical multi-capping treatment to the photoanode.

A method that can be used for for recognizing facial expressions of multiple persons is proposed. I n this method, the condition of facial muscles is assigned to a hidden state of a HMM for each expression. Then, the probability of the state is updated according to a feature vector obtained from image processing. Image processing is performed in two steps. First, a velocity vector is estimated from every two successive frames b y using an optical flow algorithm. Then, a two-dimensional Fourier transform is applied to a velocity vector field at the regions around an eye and the mouth. The coefficients f o r lower frequencies are selected to f o r m a feature vector. A mixture densit y is used f o r approximating the output probability of the HMM so as to represent a variation in facial expressions among persons. To cope with the case when two expressions are displayed contiguously, the HMM computation is modified such that when the peak of a facial motion is detected, a new sequence of facial expressions is assumed to start from the previous frame with minimal facial motion. Experiments show that a mixture density is effective because recognition accuracy improves as the number of mixtures increases. In addition, the method correctly recognizes a facial expression that contiguously follows another one.

Abstract-Organic contamination (~2965 and ~1260 cm −1 peaks) was found on Tagish Lake (C2) and Murchison (CM2) carbonaceous chondrites containing abundant hydrous minerals by Fourier transform infrared (FTIR) microspectroscopy on the samples pressed on Al plates. On the other hand, anhydrous chondrite (Moss, CO3) was not contaminated. This contamination occurred within one day of storage, when the samples pressed on Al were stored within containers including silicone rubber mats. Volatile molecules having similar peaks to the contaminants were detected by long-path gas cell FTIR measurements for the silicone rubber mat. Rapid adsorption of the volatile contaminants also occurred when silica gel and hydrous minerals such as serpentine were stored in containers including silicone rubber, silicone grease, or adhesive tape. However, they did not show any contamination when stored in glass and polystyrene containers without these compounds. Therefore, precious astronomical samples such as meteorites, interplanetary dust particles (IDPs), and mission-returned samples from comets, asteroids, and Mars, should be measured by micro FTIR within one day of storage in glass containers without silicone rubber, silicone grease, or adhesive tape.

Hydrogels made of peptide amphiphiles (PA) have attracted a lot of interest in biomedical fields. Considering the applications of PA hydrogels, the control of the gelation speed and the gel characteristics is essential to predominantly determine the usefulness and practicability of the hydrogels. In this work, the effects of the salt concentrations using sodium dihydrogenorthophosphate (NaH2PO4) on the sol-gel transition behaviors, especially the gelation speed and the gel characteristics of the designed PA (C16-W3K) hydrogels in aqueous solution were discussed. It was found that the original solution state before rheological testing was independent of the salt concentration, which was confirmed by observing the self-assembly structures and the peptide secondary structures of PA through transmission electron microscopy (TEM) and circular dichroism spectroscopy (CD). The PA solutions with different salt concentrations, however, presented a profound difference in the gelation speed and the gel characteristics: the solution exhibited higher gelation speeds and higher mechanical properties at higher salt concentrations. Concurrently, the density, the length of wormlike micelles, and the conformational ratio of β-sheets to α-helices in the equilibrium PA solutions all increased with the increase in the salt concentrations.

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