Because of the strong interfacial interaction between PVA and GE, which mainly Smoothened Agonist resulted from the hydrogen-bond interaction, together with the improvement in the PVA crystallinity, the mechanical properties and thermal stability of the nanocomposites were obviously improved. The tensile strength was increased from 23 MPa for PVA to 49.5 MPa for the nanocomposite with a 3.25 wt % GE loading.

(C) 2010 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Appl Polym Sci 118: 275-279, 2010″
“Fiber Bragg grating (FBG) is side-polished to enable interaction with sensitive materials around FBG fiber core. Using TbFeCo magneto-optic thin film deposited onto FBG fiber core as transducer, a FBG refractive index senor for magnetic field/current characterization is first proposed and demonstrated in this paper. Magnetic field sensing experiments show 19 pm of wavelength shift at a magnetic field intensity of 50 mT, the average linearity of magnetic field response is 0.9877. (C) 2010 American Institute of Physics. [doi: 10.1063/1.3466981]“
“Background: No studies have examined dietary patterns and breast cancer risk in a large cohort of African American women.

Objective: We investigated the association between dietary patterns and breast cancer risk in the Black Women’s Health Study.

Design: This is LB-100 a prospective cohort study of 50,778 participants followed biennially from 1995 through

2007. During 443,742 person-years of follow-up, 1094 incident cases of breast cancer were identified. Factor analysis was used to derive food patterns based on 69 food variables. We used Cox regression models to obtain incident rate ratios (IRRs) for breast cancer in relation to quintiles of each of the 2 dietary patterns, with adjustment for other breast cancer risk factors.

Results: Through factor analysis, we identified 2 dietary patterns: Western (refined grains, processed meat, and

sweets) and prudent (whole grains, vegetables, fruit, and fish). The prudent diet was HDAC inhibitor review weakly associated with lower breast cancer risk overall; P for trend = 0.06. In analyses stratified by body mass index (BMI; in kg/m(2)), the prudent dietary pattern was associated with a significantly lower risk of breast cancer in women with a BMI <25 (IRR: 0.64; 95% CI: 0.43, 0.93; P for trend = 0.01). The prudent dietary pattern was also associated with a significantly lower risk of breast cancer in premenopausal women (IRR: 0.70; 95% CI: 0.52, 0.96; P for trend = 0.01), and we found a significant inverse association for the prudent dietary pattern and estrogen receptor-negative breast cancer (IRR: 0.52; 95% CI: 0.28, 0.94; P for trend <0.01).

Conclusion: Our findings suggest that the prudent dietary pattern may protect against breast cancer in some black women. Am J Clin Nutr 2009;90:621-8.