We establish relationships between mechanical force generated through device expansion and alteration in diffusion within the arterial wall and perform simulations to elucidate the impact of such alterations in spatio-temporal drug release and tissue uptake. Mechanical deformation of the arterial wall results in modified drug transport properties and tissue drug concentrations, highlighting the importance of coupling solid mechanics with drug transport. It has been shown that there exists significance dependence between hydration and biomechanical properties of hydrated tissues such as cornea. The primary purpose of this study was to determine hydration effects on mechanical properties of sclera. Scleral strips, dissected from the posterior part of pig eyes along the superior-inferior direction, were divided into four hydration groups by first drying them and then soaking them in PBS until their hydration reached to 75%, 100%, 150%, and 200%. The strips were subjected to ten consecutive cycles of loading and unloading up to 1 MPa. The response of samples at the tenth cycle was used to compute the tangent modulus, maximum strain, and hysteresis as a function of hydration. The experiments were done in oil in order to prevent hydration changes during the mechanical tests. The mechanical response of strips right after dissection, control group, was also measured. In general, significant softening of scleral strips was found with increasing hydration (p  0.99.  https://www.selleckchem.com/products/u73122.html  The present study showed that hydration would significantly alter the tensile response of scleral tissue. Thus, the hydration of scleral specimens during mechanical experimental measurements should be carefully controlled. The thermal neutron-induced gamma-ray background in 124Sn is investigated in connection with neutrinoless double beta decay (0νββ) studies in 124Sn. For this purpose, a 99.26% enriched 124Sn sample was irradiated with a thermal neutron fluence of 3×1015/cm2 in the Dhruva reactor at the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre, Mumbai. The gamma ray spectra of the irradiated sample were measured in a low background counting setup to study both long-lived and short-lived activities. The present data give an independent measurement of the half-life of 125Sn*(32+) and 125Sn(112-) as 10.01(8) min and 9.63(2) d, respectively. The impact of the observed high-energy gamma rays and the residual activity due to 125Sb, on the background in the region of interest around the Qββ value of 124Sn (~2.291 MeV) is discussed. An innovative seawater uranium adsorbent was prepared from the low-cost and commercially-available polyacrylonitrile (PAN) fibers. The optimum condition to synthesize the adsorbent was to irradiate the PAN fibers with 100 kGy gamma ray, amidoximate in 3 (w/v)% hydroxylamine hydrochloride solution for 75 min at 75 °C, yielding the PAN nitrile group conversion of approximately 60%. At 100 kGy, the degree of crystallinity of the irradiated fibers was also highest at 79.1%. The performances of the adsorbent in seawater samples were excellent. By submersion in the seawater sample spiked with 250 ppb of uranium for 4 weeks, the prepared fibers exhibited the adsorption capacity of 32.28 mg/g adsorbent. By submersion in seawater samples spiked with 76.5 ppm of uranium for 1 week and 945 ppm of uranium for up to 4 weeks, the fibers exhibited the adsorption capacities of 111.25 and 200.07 mg/g adsorbent, respectively. The adsorbent showed a uranium adsorption capacity of 0.11 mg/g adsorbent for 8 weeks of soaking in brine concentrate from a seawater reverse osmosis plant. The kinetics of seawater absorption by the adsorbent was quite rapid, reaching the equilibrium swelling ratio of approximately 300% in 5 min or less. Another important finding was that the prepared PAN fibers exhibit the characteristics of a superabsorbent material (equilibrium swelling ratio in DI water of 5,550%). The low cost and the ease of preparation of the fibers offer a novel environmental remediation process to adsorb uranium ions released into seawater following a nuclear accident. Alloys of the type Pb60Sn20ZnxCd(20-x) where x = 0, 5, 10, 15 or 20 were prepared by a conventional melt quench technique. The intensity distribution of backscattered photons from the radioactive isotopes 22Na and 137Cs (with photon energies of 511 keV and 662 keV, respectively) were recorded for different thicknesses of alloy samples and some metallic samples (Al, Zn, Sn and Pb) with use of a GAMMA-RAD5 spectrometer (76 mm × 76 mm NaI(Tl) scintillation detector). Backscattered photon intensities were plotted as a function of both the atomic number and the target thickness. A best fit curve was drawn between backscattered photon counts and the atomic number of the metallic samples, from which the effective atomic numbers (Zeff) of the alloys were obtained at a particular photon energy as well as thickness. The experimentally obtained Zeff values are in good agreement with the theoretical ones (based on mass attenuation coefficients from the WinXCom database). The plot of intensity versus thickness shows that the intensity of backscattered photons increases with sample thickness. The albedo factors (energy albedo, number albedo and dose albedo) were also determined experimentally at these photon energies for the alloys and metallic samples. In the Compton scattering dominant region, the albedo factors decrease with an increase in atomic number as well as with an increase in photon energy. The present Monte Carlo study was devoted to the comparison of photoneutron contamination (per 1 Gy photon dose), along the maze of a radiotherapy bunker, between two 18-MV modalities grid therapy (with grids made of brass, cerrobend, and lead) and conventional radiotherapy. It was turned out that both in grid therapy and in conventional radiotherapy, with increasing distance from the entrance of treatment hall (toward the maze entrance), fluence and ambient dose equivalent of neutrons decrease. Evidence also shows that in grid therapy, independent of materials used in the grid construction, photoneutron contamination along the maze is 45±6 % larger than conventional radiotherapy.