Staggered field

Fig. 47. Evolution of AF Bragg intensity (full circles, right scale) with hydrostatic pressure. Full circles (leftmost scale) denote internal staggered field from Si NMR. Triangles and squares denote AF volume fraction v fi om the same experiment (Amitsuka et al., 2002).

With rapid advances in hardware, database management and information processing systems, efficient and competitive manufacturing has become an information-intensive activity. The amounts of data presently collected in the field on a routine basis are staggering, and it is not unusual to find plants where as many as 20,000 variables are continuously monitored and stored (Taylor, 1989). 

Fig. 4.35 The field ion images show two W adatoms forming a straight bond, or configuration 0, and staggered bonds, or configurations 1 on a W (112) surface. Also shown are pair energies at four bond distances for Re-Re pairs, from Ehrlich and co-workers, and W-W pairs, from Cowan and Tsong. interacting across the atomic channels of the W (112) plane.

The number of possible mechanisms by which a chemical can exert a toxic effect on humans and other species is staggering. As shown here, some are well understood, but further elucidation of mechanisms of toxic action is direly needed to propagate the field of safe chemical design. However, this cannot be a reason for molecular designers not to attempt to consider the most likely reactivity of a chemical inside an organism, and to make an effort to minimize rationally either its bioavailability, metabolic activation, or ligand binding interactions with biomolecules. 

Nature is full of drugs. Even animals use and abuse drugs. For example, birds eat certain kinds of berries that ferment on the tree, literally getting drunk on them until they can barely stagger, let alone fly. Elephants have been known to seek out piles of grain fermenting in the fields and even learn to break into enclosures where such grain is stored. Made rowdy by the effects of the alcohol, the elephants can be a serious or even deadly nuisance. 

In the past ten years a huge amount of data by laser spectroscopy of short lived isotopes have been collected and the field is still developping with new proposed technics. Instead of analysis of individual data, which is not desirable, trends may be found and thus raise up further theoretical interest. In this respect, the odd-even staggering in isotope shift, a feature well known long ago and very well documented, deserves certainly a close theoretical attention. 

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