This review covers several basic methodologies of surface treatment and their effects on titanium (Ti) implants. The importance of each treatment and its effects will be discussed in detail in order to compare their effectiveness in promoting osseointegration. Published literature for the last 18 years was selected with the use of keywords like titanium dental implant, surface roughness, coating, and osseointegration. Significant surface roughness played an important role in providing effective surface for bone implant contact, cell proliferation, and removal torque, despite having good mechanical properties. Overall, published studies indicated that an acid etched surface-modified and a coating application on commercial pure titanium implant was most preferable in producing the good surface roughness. Thus, a combination of a good surface roughness and mechanical properties of titanium could lead to successful dental implants.

We report for the first time simultaneous observations of medium‐scale traveling ionospheric disturbances (MSTIDs) at geomagnetic conjugate points in both hemispheres, using two all‐sky airglow imagers at midlatitudes. A 630‐nm all‐sky CCD imager at Sata, Japan, detected MSTIDs with a wavefront elongated from NW to SE on the night of August 9, 2002. During this event, MSTIDs with a wavefront elongated from SW to NE were observed at the geomagnetic conjugate point, Darwin, Australia. To investigate geomagnetic conjugacy of the MSTID structures, the Darwin images were mapped The MSTID structures mapped from Darwin to its magnetic conjugate points along the geomagnetic field lines (B) coincide closely with those in the Sata images. This result suggests that polarization electric field (Ep) plays an important role in the generation of MSTIDs. Ep maps along B and moves the F region plasma upward or downward by E × B drifts, causing plasma density perturbations with structures mirrored in the northern and southern hemispheres.

Using global positioning system (GPS) data taken from 350 dual-frequency GPS receivers in Southern California in 2002, we investigated two-dimensional maps of total electron content (TEC) perturbations with a time resolution of 30 s and a spatial resolution of 0.15 • ×0.15 • in longitude and latitude to reveal statistical characteristics of medium-scale traveling ionospheric disturbances (MSTIDs). We found that MSTIDs can be categorized into three types. One type is daytime MSTIDs, which frequently occur in winter and equinoxes. Since most of the daytime MSTIDs propagated southeastward, we speculate that the daytime MSTIDs could be caused by atmospheric gravity waves in the thermosphere. A second type is nighttime MSTIDs, which frequently occur in summer. Nighttime MSTIDs propagate southwestward. This propagation direction is consistent with the idea that polarization electric fields could play an important role in generating nighttime MSTIDs. The third is dusk MSTIDs, which frequently occur in summer and propagate northwestward. Dusk MSTIDs could be caused by gravity waves originating from the sunset terminator because they have wavefronts almost parallel to the sunset terminator.

[1] Nighttime and daytime medium-scale traveling ionospheric disturbances (MSTIDs) are detected with dense and wide detrended total electron content (TEC) maps over North America using multiple GPS receiver networks. The TEC maps cover a wide region of 60-130°W and 24-54°N (30-65°N in geomagnetic latitude), and have a spatial resolution of 1.05°Â 1.05°in latitude and longitude (0.15°Â 0.15°with 7 Â 7 pixel smoothing) and a temporal resolution of 30 seconds. The TEC maps reveal, for the first time, that the nighttime MSTIDs propagate southwestward with 200 -500 km wavelengths over North America and have wavefronts longer than $2,000 km. We also observe that daytime MSTIDs with 300 -1,000 km wavelengths propagate southeastward until mid-afternoon and southwestward in the late afternoon. In the mid-to-late afternoon, these MSTIDs propagating in the different directions are superimposed. The TEC maps can be a new powerful tool to investigate the MSTIDs.

All the details of ionospheric disturbances following the 2011 Tohoku Earthquake were first revealed by the high-resolution GPS total electron content observation in Japan. The initial ionospheric disturbance appeared as sudden depletions following small impulsive TEC enhancements ∼7 minutes after the earthquake onset, near the epicenter. Then, concentric waves appeared to propagate in the radial direction with a velocity of 138-3,457 m/s. Zonally-extended enhancements of the TEC also appeared in the west of Japan. In the vicinity of the epicenter, short-period oscillations with a period of ∼4 minutes were observed. This paper focuses on the concentric waves. The concentric pattern indicates that they had a point source. The center of these structures, termed the "ionospheric epicenter", was located about 170 km from the epicenter in the southeast direction. According to the propagation characteristics, these concentric waves could be caused by atmospheric waves classified into three types: acoustic waves generated from a propagating Rayleigh wave, acoustic waves from the ionospheric epicenter, and atmospheric gravity waves from the ionospheric epicenter. The amplitude of the concentric waves was not uniform and was dependent on the azimuth of their propagation direction, which could not be explained by previously-proposed theory.