Characterization of a negative cis-acting DNA element regulating the transcription of CYP2B1/B2 gene in rat liver

Polymeric films were deposited from hydroxyethylmethacrylate (HEMA) plasma on non-woven poly(butyleneterephtalate) (PBT) filter materials. To test the effect of deposition conditions on surface properties, film were deposited using a constant monomer flow rate and a discharge power ranging from 40-100 W. Surface composition and surface energetics were evaluated by Electron Spectroscopy for Chemical Analysis (ESCA) and contact angle measurement, respectively. Albumin (Alb) and fibrinogen (Fg) adsorption from single protein solutions to the plasma-coated filters was measured. Results illustrate the marked effects of the deposition condition on the surface composition, the surface field of forces, and the protein adsorption behavior. The latter is modeled by the application of the Good-van Oss-Chaudhury theory of Lewis acid-base contribution to interfacial energetics. Materials endowed with widely different properties are obtained from the same monomer and different deposition conditions, a result that must be taken into account both in the production step, to assure constant quality, and in the development of specifically tailored materials.     

Who and what links to the Internet Archive

The Internet Archive’s (IA) Wayback Machine is the largest and oldest public Web archive and has become a significant repository of our recent history and cultural heritage. Despite its importance, there has been little research about how it is discovered and used. Based on Web access logs, we analyze what users are looking for, why they come to IA, where they come from, and how pages link to IA. We find that users request English pages the most, followed by the European languages. Most human users come to Web archives because they do not find the requested pages on the live Web. About 65 % of the requested archived pages no longer exist on the live Web. We find that more than 82 % of human sessions connect to the Wayback Machine via referrals from other Web sites, while only 15 % of robots have referrers. Most of the links (86 %) from Websites are to individual archived pages at specific points in time, and of those 83 % no longer exist on the live Web. Finally, we find that users who come from search engines browse more pages than users who come from external Web sites.     

Provable security of a pairing-free one-pass authenticated key establishment protocol for wireless sensor networks

Designing efficient as well as secure cryptographic protocols for resource-constrained applications is a challenging task. In this paper, we formally analyze the security of an efficient one-pass authenticated key establishment protocol, the 1P-AKE protocol, which is primarily proposed for resource-constrained sensor nodes devices in wireless sensor networks (WSNs). In contrast to the existing identity-based one-pass key establishment protocols, the 1P-AKE protocol does not require any bilinear pairing computation in order to establish a key. This feature makes it really attractive for resource-constrained application environments, such as WSNs, where pairing computations are too expensive. We show that in the random oracle model, the 1P-AKE protocol is a secure authenticated one-pass key establishment protocol under the computational Diffie–Hellman assumption. The performance of the 1P-AKE protocol is also discussed and compared with the existing relevant protocols.     

Detecting off-topic pages within TimeMaps in Web archives

Web archives have become a significant repository of our recent history and cultural heritage. Archival integrity and accuracy is a precondition for future cultural research. Currently, there are no quantitative or content-based tools that allow archivists to judge the quality of the Web archive captures. In this paper, we address the problems of detecting when a particular page in a Web archive collection has gone off-topic relative to its first archived copy. We do not delete off-topic pages (they remain part of the collection), but they are flagged as off-topic so they can be excluded for consideration for downstream services, such as collection summarization and thumbnail generation. We propose different methods (cosine similarity, Jaccard similarity, intersection of the 20 most frequent terms, Web-based kernel function, and the change in size using the number of words and content length) to detect when a page has gone off-topic. Those predicted off-topic pages will be presented to the collection’s curator for possible elimination from the collection or cessation of crawling. We created a gold standard data set from three Archive-It collections to evaluate the proposed methods at different thresholds. We found that combining cosine similarity at threshold 0.10 and change in size using word count at threshold ?0.85 performs the best with accuracy = 0.987, \(F_{1}\) score = 0.906, and AUC \(=\) 0.968. We evaluated the performance of the proposed method on several Archive-It collections. The average precision of detecting off-topic pages in the collections is 0.89.     

Redox proteomics identification of 4‐hydroxynonenal‐modified brain proteins in Alzheimer's disease: Role of lipid peroxidation in Alzheimer's disease pathogenesis

Numerous studies have shown that neuronal lipids are highly susceptible to oxidative stress including in those brain areas directly involved in the neurodegenerative process of Alzheimer's disease (AD). Lipid peroxidation directly damages membranes and also generates a number of secondary biologically active products (toxic aldehydes)that are capable of easily attacking lipids, proteins, and DNA. Accumulating evidence has demonstrated regionally increased brain lipid peroxidation in patients with AD; however, extensive studies on specific targets of lipid peroxidation‐induced damage are still missing. The present study represents a further step in understanding the relationship between oxidative modification of protein and neuronal death associated with AD. We used a proteomics approach to determine specific targets of lipid peroxidation in AD brain, both in hippocampus and inferior parietal lobule, by coupling immunochemical detection of 4‐hydroxynonenal‐bound proteins with 2‐D polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis and MS analysis. We identified 4‐hydroxynonenal‐bound proteins in the hippocampus and inferior parietal lobule brain regions of subjects with AD. The identified proteins play different biological functions including energy metabolism, antioxidant system, and structural proteins, thus impairing multiple molecular pathways. Our results provide further evidence for the role of lipid peroxidation in the pathogenesis of AD.     

Multicast Network Security with Asymmetric Cooperative Relaying

International Journal of Wireless Information Networks - This paper exhibits the confidentiality performance study of a cooperative multicast network consisting of $${\mathcal {K}}$$ asymmetric...     

Dual‐Action Cancer Therapy with Targeted Porous Silicon Nanovectors

There is a pressing need to develop more effective therapeutics to fight cancer. An idyllic chemotherapeutic is expected to overcome drug resistance of tumors and minimize harmful side effects to healthy tissues. Antibody‐functionalized porous silicon nanoparticles loaded with a combination of chemotherapy drug and gold nanoclusters (AuNCs) are developed. These nanocarriers are observed to selectively deliver both payloads, the chemotherapy drug and AuNCs, to human B cells. The accumulation of AuNCs to target cells and subsequent exposure to an external electromagnetic field in the microwave region render them more susceptible to the codelivered drug. This approach represents a targeted two‐stage delivery nanocarrier that benefits from a dual therapeutic action that results in enhanced cytotoxicity.     

A Service Level Agreement Aware Online Algorithm for Virtual Machine Migration

The demand for cloud computing has increased manifold in the recent past. More specifically, on-demand computing has seen a rapid rise as organizations rely mostly on cloud service providers for their day-to-day computing needs. The cloud service provider fulfills different user requirements using virtualization - where a single physical machine can host multiple Virtual Machines. Each virtual machine potentially represents a different user environment such as operating system, programming environment, and applications. However, these cloud services use a large amount of electrical energy and produce greenhouse gases. To reduce the electricity cost and greenhouse gases, energy efficient algorithms must be designed. One specific area where energy efficient algorithms are required is virtual machine consolidation. With virtual machine consolidation, the objective is to utilize the minimum possible number of hosts to accommodate the required virtual machines, keeping in mind the service level agreement requirements. This research work formulates the virtual machine migration as an online problem and develops optimal offline and online algorithms for the single host virtual machine migration problem under a service level agreement constraint for an over-utilized host. The online algorithm is analyzed using a competitive analysis approach. In addition, an experimental analysis of the proposed algorithm on real-world data is conducted to showcase the improved performance of the proposed algorithm against the benchmark algorithms. Our proposed online algorithm consumed 25% less energy and performed 43% fewer migrations than the benchmark algorithms.     

Electrospinning hollow and core/sheath nanofibers using hydrodynamic fluid focusing

Hollow poly (vinylpyrrolidone) (PVP) + TiO₂ and polypyrrole (core)/PVP (sheath) nanofibers were successfully electrospun using hydrodynamic fluid focusing. Utilizing a two-dimensional fluid focusing technique previously applied to aqueous solutions, intersecting microchannels cast in (poly)dimethylsiloxane were utilized to dynamically center core fluids in immiscible sheath fluids prior to electrospinning at the channel outlet. Advantages of using microfluidic channel networks for the electrospinning of composite nanofibers include spatiotemporal control over input reagents, ease of fabrication and the ability to focus the core stream into sheath layer without the need of complex co-annular nozzles.