Action of levorin on glucose transport in the rat small intestine

The technique of accumulating preparation of the mucosa and "turned out sac" was used to show that levorin, a polyenic antibiotic in a concentration of 10(-6) M, lowered the transport rate and accumulation of glucose by the epithelial cells of the rat thin intestine under conditions of oxygenation. Suppression of the glucose transport in the first stages resulted in partial inhibition of the transmembrane transfer. It is suggested that levorin suppression of the glucose transport through the erythrocyte apical membrane in the thin intestine is associated with a decrease in the electrochemical gradient of Na+.     

Adsorption of organic molecules from aqueous solutions on carbon materials

Adsorption of organic molecules from dilute aqueous solutions on carbon materials is a complex interplay between non-electrostatic and electrostatic interactions. Non-electrostatic interactions are essentially due to dispersion and hydrophobic interactions, whereas the electrostatic or coulombic interactions appear with electrolytes when they are ionized at the experimental conditions used. Both interactions depend on the characteristics of the adsorbent and the adsorptive and the solution chemistry. Among them the carbon surface chemistry has a great influence on both electrostatic and non-electrostatic interactions, and can be considered one of the main factors in the adsorption mechanism from dilute aqueous solutions. In this paper the current knowledge about the fundamental factors that control the adsorption process from aqueous phase will be presented.     

Experimental automobile-pedestrian injuries

Fifteen fresh cadaver impacts were conducted in simulation of pedestrian-automobile accidents. The test sled configuration simulated an automobile bumper and hood in "standard" and "nosedive" situations as well as "hard" and "soft" impact surfaces. Instrumentation and film demonstrated large axial compression forces in the struck leg and considerable angular velocity of the torso in all modes. Dissection revealed primary injury at the impact site at low velocities with added remote injury at high velocities. Fracture of the lateral tibial plateau was most common. Lowering the bumper height offered the greatest protection against injury at moderate impact velocities.     

Output feedback trajectory stabilization of the uncertainty DC servomechanism system

This work proposes a solution for the output feedback trajectory-tracking problem in the case of an uncertain DC servomechanism system. The system consists of a pendulum actuated by a DC motor and subject to a time-varying bounded disturbance. The control law consists of a Proportional Derivative controller and an uncertain estimator that allows compensating the effects of the unknown bounded perturbation. Because the motor velocity state is not available from measurements, a second-order sliding-mode observer permits the estimation of this variable in finite time. This last feature allows applying the Separation Principle. The convergence analysis is carried out by means of the Lyapunov method. Results obtained from numerical simulations and experiments in a laboratory prototype show the performance of the closed loop system.     

Kidney injury and cell therapy: Preclinical study

The aim of this study is to show histological and immunofluorescence analysis of renal parenchyma of agoutis affected by gentamicin‐induced renal disease after the infusion of bone marrow mononuclear cells (BMMC) stained with Hoechst®. Nine agouti's males were divided into three groups: Test group (TG): renal disease by gentamicin induced (n = 3), cell therapy group (CTG): renal disease by gentamicin induced and BMMC infusion (n = 3), and control group (CG): nonrenal disease and BMMC infusion (n = 3). TG and CTG were submitted to the protocol of renal disease induction using weekly application of gentamicin sulfate for 4 months. CG and CTG received a 1 × 108 BMMC stained with Hoechst and were euthanized for kidney examination 21 days after BMMC injection and samples were collected for histology and immunofluorescence analysis. Histological analysis demonstrated typical interstitial lesions in kidney similarly to human disease, as tubular necrosis, glomerular destruction, atrophy tubular, fibrotic areas, and collagen deposition. We conclude that histological analysis suggest a positive application of agouti's as a model for a gentamicin inducing of kidney disease, beyond the immunofluorescence analysis suggest a significant migration of BMMC to sites of renal injury in CTG. Microsc. Res. Tech., 2012. © 2011 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

Highly discriminative statistical features for email classification

This paper reports on email classification and filtering, more specifically on spam versus ham and phishing versus spam classification, based on content features. We test the validity of several novel statistical feature extraction methods. The methods rely on dimensionality reduction in order to retain the most informative and discriminative features. We successfully test our methods under two schemas. The first one is a classic classification scenario using a 10-fold cross-validation technique for several corpora, including four ground truth standard corpora: Ling-Spam, SpamAssassin, PU1, and a subset of the TREC 2007 spam corpus, and one proprietary corpus. In the second schema, we test the anticipatory properties of our extracted features and classification models with two proprietary datasets, formed by phishing and spam emails sorted by date, and with the public TREC 2007 spam corpus. The contributions of our work are an exhaustive comparison of several feature selection and extraction methods in the frame of email classification on different benchmarking corpora, and the evidence that especially the technique of biased discriminant analysis offers better discriminative features for the classification, gives stable classification results notwithstanding the amount of features chosen, and robustly retains their discriminative value over time and data setups. These findings are especially useful in a commercial setting, where short profile rules are built based on a limited number of features for filtering emails.     

Walking and steering control for a 3D biped robot considering ground contact and stability

This paper presents a stable walking control method for a 3D bipedal robot with 14 joint actuators. The overall control law consists of a ZMP (zero moment point) controller, a swing ankle rotation controller and a partial joint angles controller. The ZMP controller guarantees that the stance foot remains in flat contact with the ground. The swing ankle rotation controller ensures a flat foot impact at the end of the swinging phase. Each of these controllers creates 2 constraints on joint accelerations. As a consequence, the partial joint angles controller is implemented to track only 10 independent outputs. These outputs are defined as a linear combination of the 14 joint angles. The most important question addressed in this paper is how this linear combination can be defined in order to ensure walking stability. The stability of the walking gait under closed loop control is evaluated with the linearization of the restricted Poincare map of the hybrid zero dynamics. As a result, the robot can achieve an asymptotically stable and periodic walking along a straight line. Finally, another feedback controller is supplemented to adjust the walking direction of the robot and some examples of the robot steered to walk along different paths with mild curvature are given.     

Self-calibrated,Multi-spectral Photometric Stereo for 3D Face Capture

This paper addresses the problem of obtaining 3d detailed reconstructions of human faces in real-time and with inexpensive hardware. We present an algorithm based on a monocular multi-spectral photometric-stereo setup. This system is known to capture high-detailed deforming 3d surfaces at high frame rates and without having to use any expensive hardware or synchronized light stage. However, the main challenge of such a setup is the calibration stage, which depends on the lights setup and how they interact with the specific material being captured, in this case, human faces. For this purpose we develop a self-calibration technique where the person being captured is asked to perform a rigid motion in front of the camera, maintaining a neutral expression. Rigidity constrains are then used to compute the head’s motion with a structure-from-motion algorithm. Once the motion is obtained, a multi-view stereo algorithm reconstructs a coarse 3d model of the face. This coarse model is then used to estimate the lighting parameters with a stratified approach: In the first step we use a RANSAC search to identify purely diffuse points on the face and to simultaneously estimate this diffuse reflectance model. In the second step we apply non-linear optimization to fit a non-Lambertian reflectance model to the outliers of the previous step. The calibration procedure is validated with synthetic and real data.     

Optimal acceptance sampling plans for log-location-scale lifetime models using average risks

Assuming that the probability of obtaining a defective unit in a production process, p, is not constant, a versatile methodology is presented for determining optimal failure-censored reliability sampling plans for log-location-scale lifetime models. The optimization procedure to decide the acceptability of a product is usually sufficiently accurate for the most widely used parametric lifetime models, such as the Weibull and lognormal distributions, and fairly robust to small deviations in the prior knowledge. Moreover, lower and upper bounds on the optimal sample size, and the corresponding acceptance constants, are derived in closed-forms. The proposed approach extends the traditional sampling plans to those cases in which appreciable prior information on p exists, and also allows the analyst the flexibility to delimitate the range of p and to incorporate into the reliability analysis prior impartiality between the producer and the consumer. In addition, the practitioners may achieve substantial savings in sample size, better information on the production process and better assessment of the true producer and consumer risks. An example related to the acceptability of a certain kind of gyroscope is included for illustrative purposes. Various practical prior distributions are considered to describe the random fluctuations in the proportion defective.