Executive Summary Our goals for the past year have focused on developing and refining an experiment to directly and quantitatively measure thermal rupture forces in a depletion system. Keeping in mind that we want to relate these force measurements to the macroscopic rheology of the gels, we have conducted these experiments using a new model system that will enable us to measure the rupture forces, observe the microstructure using confocal microscopy, and also measure the rheology of the gels. This work is being performed in close collaboration with Professor Michael Solomon, University of...