Zinc oxide nanoparticles (ZnO NPs) have demonstrated the ability to improve lubrication and thermal conductivity, and stand as promising metalworking lubricant and coolant additives due to their low cost compared to other NPs. While nanomaterials are a focus of research due to their potential to enable advanced technologies, little is...
Evaporation synergy is a phenomenon that occurs between different classes of soil and allows for a greater amount/quantity of soil water evaporation. 20 of the 66 soil texture class combinations have been shown to exhibit evaporation synergy (Fisher, 2012), however the impact of column width on the functionality of this...
The Rusty Blackbird (Euphagus carolinus) has suffered significant population declines across its entire geographic range and the mechanisms associated with this decline are poorly understood. Although much of the Rusty Blackbird breeding habitat in Alaska has remained relatively unaltered by anthropogenic activities, this species continues to decline by an estimated...
Relationship between the exchange rate and the trade balance is a key component for a developing nation. Although, in theoretical sense, depreciation of currency would result in an improvement in the trade balance, sluggish response of trade flows to changes in currency has prompted researches to look in to the...
String theory, one of the more popular approaches to quantizing gravity, is a highly complex
theory, involving high level mathematics and physics. But the basic ideas of string theory are not inaccessible, even to the undergraduate. This document acts as report to my thesis project, the writing of A Detailed...
Natural products isolated from bacteria can be developed into new therapeutic agents. The soil bacteria actinomycetes, specifically the Streptomyces species, are prolific producers of antibiotics. This thesis is composed of two projects which focus on novel drug discovery from soil bacteria collected from the Indonesian Black Water Ecosystem (the ICBB...
Titanium dioxide, in the anatase form, is a photocatalyst and has applications in water pollution reduction. Efficiency can be improved with a graphene substrate, which delays electron-hole recombination and may reduce the band gap. In this work, we determine if graphene can also act as a morphactant, changing the shape...
Amphiphilic gold nanoparticle surfactants can self-assemble at oil-water interfaces to form stable Pickering emulsions. These nanoparticle surfactants have previously been synthesized by functionalizing gold nanoparticles with thiol terminated polyethylene glycol (PEG-thiol), and subsequently with an alkane-thiol. It is necessary to improve the bio-compatibility of the nanoparticles if they are to...
In recent years, non-coding DNA has received much attention within the scientific
community. This attention has not only illuminated the mystery behind functionally
important regions like the centromere, but has also brought to light additional important
questions regarding centromere mechanisms, inheritance, and cellular recognition by the
kinetochore, a protein complex...
Tetrachlorethene (PCE) and trichloroethene (TCE) were common solvents used in the 1970’s that are now frequently observed groundwater contaminants. One method of remediating these contaminants is in-situ bioremediation that uses a dechlorinating microbial population. The microbial population performs the sequential reductive dechlorination of PCE and TCE to cis-1,2-dichloroethene (c-DCE), vinyl...