In this paper, we propose a simple and efficient principle to realize this goal based on a partial Luneburg lens. In the experiment, a traditional Vivaldi antenna is used as the platform to test the principle, in which the partial Luneburg lens is constructed by drilled-holes dielectric composite material. The measurement results show that good beam-steering performance from -20 to 20 degrees in a broad bandwidth (8-11 GHz) has been achieved using the proposed method, and the antenna’s gain IPI-145 mouse and directivity have been significantly improved in the same bandwidth after using the

special lens. (C) 2011 American Institute of Physics. [doi:10.1063/1.3651376]“
“Neutralizing antibody (nAb) activity during the course of natural infection is believed to be crucial to combating virus propagation. The aim of this study was to measure the impact of nAb response on HCV Quizartinib early kinetics and genetic evolution in the liver transplantation (LT) setting. A cohort of 28 patients undergoing LT for HCV-related cirrhosis was included in the study. Viral load, nAb titers and hypervariable region 1 (HVR1) sequences were determined in serum samples obtained before and at different time points after LT. Serum nAb titers were assessed using HCV pseudoparticles (HCVpp). HVR1 sequences were obtained

by direct sequencing. Patients were classified according to viral kinetic patterns (plateau or increasing), during the first week after LT. All patients demonstrated high titers of nAbs before LT, although this was not associated with early kinetic patterns or HVR1 evolution during the first week after LT. We found that in patients with plateau HCV early kinetics, the virus required adaptive mutations, while in those with increasing viral loads, the HVR1 region remained largely conserved (p = 0.015). These data suggest that HCV adaptation via selection of the best-fitted variants may account for early viral kinetics following LT.”
“Quantum dot nanocomposites are potentially high-efficiency thermoelectric materials, which

could outperform superlattices and random nanocomposites in terms of manufacturing cost-effectiveness and material properties selleck compound because of the reduction of thermal conductivity due to the phonon-interface scattering, the enhancement of Seebeck coefficient due to the formation of minibands, and the enhancement of electrical conductivity due to the phonon-bottleneck effect in electron-phonon scattering for quantum-confined electrons. In this paper, we investigate the thermoelectric transport properties of quantum dot nanocomposites through a two-channel transport model that includes the transport of quantum-confined electrons through the hopping mechanism and the semi-classical transport of bulk-like electrons.