Fiber fractures initiate damage zones ultimately determining the strength and lifetime of metal matrix composites (MMCs). The evolution of damage in a MMC comprising a row of unidirectional SiC fibers (32 vol.%) surrounded by a Ti matrix was examined using X-ray microdiffraction (?m beam size) and macrodiffraction (mm beam size). A comparison of high-energy X-ray diffraction (XRD) techniques including a powerful two-dimensional XRD method capable of obtaining powder averaged strains from a small number of grains is presented (HE?XRD?).

Redistricting is always political, increasingly controversial, and often ugly. Politicians have always fought tooth-and-nail over district lines, while the courts, for most of their history, considered the subject a thicket too political even to enter.

Over the past decade, rapid advances in microfluidics have led to the creation of valves, pumps, mixers, multiplexers, along with a large variety of other devices. This technology has allowed for many fluidics applications to be performed on a chip that is approximately an inch square in area. Such applications include cell sorting, PCR on chip, crystal growth, combinatorial mixing and many others.

South Africa has a solid history of engagement with traditional biotechnology. It has produced one of the largest brewing companies in the world; it makes wines that compare with the best; it has created many new animal breeds and plant varieties, some of which are used commercially all over the world and it has competitive industries in the manufacture of dairy products such as cheese, yoghurt and maas and baker’s yeast and other fermentation products.

However, South Africa has failed to extract value from the more recent advances in biotechnology, particularly over the last 25 years with the emergence of genetics and genomic sciences. Already many companies and public institutions elsewhere in the world are offering products and services that have arisen from the new biotechnology. In the USA alone, there are 300 public biotechnology companies with a market capitalisation of $353 billion and an annual turnover of $22 billion p.a. Moreover, the growth of biotechnology industries is not restricted to the developed countries. Developing countries such as Cuba, Brazil and China have been quick to identify the potential benefits of the technology and have established measures both to develop such industries and to extract value where possible and relevant.

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