A general acid vapor oxidation (AVO) strategy has been developed to grow highly oriented hierarchically structured rutile TiO(2) nanoarrays with tunable morphologies from titanium thin films. This is a simple one-pot synthesis approach involving the reaction of a titanium surface with the vapor generated from a hydrochloric acid solution in a Teflon lined autoclave. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first successful attempt to grow ordered tree-like titania nanoarrays. A possible formation mechanism for the interesting architectures has been proposed based on series of time-dependent experiments. By adjusting the initial HCl concentration, films of different rutile structures including nanotrees, dendritic nanobundles, and nanorods can be selectively obtained. Subsequently, the surface morphologies and wettability can be readily tuned.

The effects of pure multiplicative noise on stochastic resonance in an anti-tumor system modulated by a seasonal external field are investigated by using theoretical analyses of the generalized potential and numerical simulations. For optimally selected values of the multiplicative noise intensity quasisymmetry of two potential minima and stochastic resonance are observed. Theoretical results and numerical simulations are in good quantitative agreement. Chemotherapy remains a traditional option for most advanced cancer. Immunotherapy, however, is a less conventional treatment modality. Usually, chemotherapy and immunotherapy have been regarded as unrelated, so relatively little research has investigated the relationship between these two therapies. Chemotherapy kills tumor cells in a special way periodically, but immunotherapy restrains the growth of tumor cells in a more likely linear way [1,2]. Since these different responses of tumor cells to chemotherapy and immunotherapy, when taken together, they imply that there is an interesting and significative case for combining chemotherapy and immunotherapy in tumor treatment.More than ever, cancer research is now an interdisciplinary effort which requires a basic knowledge of commonly used terms, facts, issues, and concepts. In the past decade, many studies have focused on the growth law of tumor cells via dynamics approach, specially using noise dynamics [3][4][5][6][7][8][9]. Phase transition of tumor growth induced by noises is one of the most novel foundations in recent years. Another phenomenon-known as stochastic resonance (SR) -shows that adding noise to a system can sometimes improve its ability to transfer information. The basic three ingredients of stochastic resonance are a threshold, a noise source and a weak input, it is clear that stochastic resonance is a common case and generic enough to be observable in a large variety of nonlinear dynamical systems [10,11]. Thus, it is reasonable to believe that SR can also occur in a tumor dynamical system.The mean field approximate analysis is a conventional theory for SR. It is originally proposed for symmetrical bistable systems with additive noise source [12]. The improvements of the theory of SR have included monostable systems [13,14], asymmetrical systems [15] and double-noises systems [16][17], but in all these studies the system has an additive noise source and an independent external field. To pure multiplicative noise systems, especially to many complex dynamical systems, it is still far difficult to solve them exactly, thus numerical methods are comparatively convenient options to solve these complex dynamical systems [18,19].In this letter, chemotherapy and immunotherapy are joined by an anti-tumor model with three elements, which are (1) a fluctuation of growth rate, (2) an immune form, and (3) a weak seasonal modulability induced by chemotherapy. Based on the analyses on its unique stochastic differential equation and relevant Fokker-Planck equation, we investigate a new type of SR phenomenon of an...

We report on a simple model of spatial extend anti-tumor system with a fluctuation in growth rate, which can undergo a nonequilibrium phase transition. Three states as excited, sub-excited and non-excited states of a tumor are defined to describe its growth. The multiplicative noise is found to be double-face: The positive effect on a non-excited tumor and the negative effect on an excited tumor.

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It is well known that surface roughness always enhances wetting for hydrophilic, but drying for hydrophobic surfaces. In this letter, the authors found that La0.7Sr0.3MnO3 coatings display distinct wettability from superhydrophilicity to superhydrophobictiy, which is tuned by their hierarchical microstructures obtained by annealing the coatings composed of nanopowder at different temperatures. This offers a strong support to Herminghaus’s model [Europhys. Lett. 52, 165 (2000)] which predicts that the material hierarchical structure determines its wettability and widens the range of raw materials for superhydrophobic surfaces.

Modification of hydrogen-free diamond-like carbon (DLC) is presented, with acrylic acid (AA) vapor carried into a vacuum chamber by argon and with the in situ assistance of low-power radio frequency (RF) plasma at a temperature below 100°C. Measured by atomic force microscopy (AFM) technique, the roughness (Ra) of the DLC was 1.063±0.040 nm. XPS and FT-IR spectra analysis showed that carboxyl groups were immobilized on the surface of the DLC films, with about 40% of carboxyl group area coverage. It was found that the RF plasma and reaction time are important in enhancing the modification rate and efficiency.

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