Changes in vascular permeability and dermal mucopolysaccharides in the female rat after parathyroidectomy

Riassunto Nei ratti femmine paratiroidectomizzati si osserva un aumento della permeabilità vasale ed una modificazione della colorazione metacromatica del derma, indipendenti dalla concentrazione del calcio nel sangue. Tali variazioni vengono attribuite a modificazioni strutturali dei mucopolisaccaridi della sostanza fondamentale del connettivo.     

Relationship between structural order and the anomalies of liquid water

In contrast to crystalline solids--for which a precise framework exists for describing structure--quantifying structural order in liquids and glasses has proved more difficult because even though such systems possess short-range order, they lack long-range crystalline order. Some progress has been made using model systems of hard spheres, but it remains difficult to describe accurately liquids such as water, where directional attractions (hydrogen bonds) combine with short-range repulsions to determine the relative orientation of neighbouring molecules as well as their instantaneous separation. This difficulty is particularly relevant when discussing the anomalous kinetic and thermodynamic properties of water, which have long been interpreted qualitatively in terms of underlying structural causes. Here we attempt to gain a quantitative understanding of these structure-property relationships through the study of translational and orientational order in a models of water. Using molecular dynamics simulations, we identify a structurally anomalous region--bounded by loci of maximum orientational order (at low densities) and minimum translational order (at high densities)--in which order decreases on compression, and where orientational and translational order are strongly coupled. This region encloses the entire range of temperatures and densities for which the anomalous diffusivity and thermal expansion coefficient of water are observed, and enables us to quantify the degree of structural order needed for these anomalies to occur. We also find that these structural, kinetic and thermodynamic anomalies constitute a cascade: they occur consecutively as the degree of order is increased.     

Supercooled liquids and the glass transition

Glasses are disordered materials that lack the periodicity of crystals but behave mechanically like solids. The most common way of making a glass is by cooling a viscous liquid fast enough to avoid crystallization. Although this route to the vitreous state-supercooling-has been known for millennia, the molecular processes by which liquids acquire amorphous rigidity upon cooling are not fully understood. Here we discuss current theoretical knowledge of the manner in which intermolecular forces give rise to complex behaviour in supercooled liquids and glasses. An intriguing aspect of this behaviour is the apparent connection between dynamics and thermodynamics. The multidimensional potential energy surface as a function of particle coordinates (the energy landscape) offers a convenient viewpoint for the analysis and interpretation of supercooling and glass-formation phenomena. That much of this analysis is at present largely qualitative reflects the fact that precise computations of how viscous liquids sample their landscape have become possible only recently.