EPJ E - Polymersomes made-to-measure
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- Published on 22 March 2011
The use of polymersomes in drug delivery, medical imaging, micro-reactors or to mimic biophysical membrane phenomena is greatly dependent on the extent to which their properties can be controlled and tuned.
Electrodeposition of an electroactive polymer and subsequent polymerization of monomers is a novel route to anchor polymer chains to electrode surfaces.
Tiny polymer droplets that crystallize on a surface are a shrewd expedient to study the birth of a polymer crystal by the elusive homogeneous nucleation mechanism. In most cases, take for example the dust particle in a snowflake, nucleation starts from a heterogenous defect. Homogenous nucleation is difficult to study because of the prevalence of defects in any bulk sample. Crystallization in small droplets alleviates this difficulty in a manner that is conceptually simple: subdivide the system into more domains than the number of defects. If the domains greatly outnumber the defects then only the homogenous mechanism can induce nucleation in a defect free compartment.
Jean-Marc Di Meglio becomes Editor in Chief of EPJ E
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- Published on 10 January 2011
We are very pleased to announce that Jean-Marc Di Meglio, Physics Professor at the University Paris Diderot, has been appointed Editor in Chief of EPJ E, with the special title of Commissioning Editor in Chief. From 1981 to 1994 he worked in the laboratory of Pierre-Gilles de Gennes at College de France, and was Professor at the University of Strasbourg from 1994 to 2002 The European Physical Journal E has benefitted from his editorial talent and vast expertise since 2007, when he joined the Editorial Board of the journal. Professor Di Meglio's work ranges from soap films to bubbles, polymers, colloids and vesicles. His latest interest is in biomechanics. Professor Di Meglio will work alongside Editors in Chief Daan Frenkel and Frank Julicher. We wish him a great experience in his new role.
The eye of the Drosophila (fruit fly) is characterized by a neat hexagonal patterns, a fascinating system to study pattern formation in biology. A recent paper published in EPJ E proposes a new mechanism to explain the emergence of this pattern.
