Tracheobronchopathia osteochondroplastica presenting at the time of a difficult intubation

Fourteen Suffolk rams (6 mo) were diagnosed with chronic copper poisoning. Preliminary results indicated that a combination of serum aspartate aminotransferase, gamma glutamyltransferase, and copper could be used as a test so that high risk lambs could be treated more aggressively.     

Sexual Pavlovian conditioned approach behavior in male Japanese quail (Coturnix coturnix japonica).

In 3 studies, a localized visual stimulus presented immediately prior to access to a female conspecific stimulated approach behavior in male Japanese quail after several conditioning trials. Development of this conditioned approach behavior was observed with 2 types of signal lights, 10- and 30-sec signal durations, large and small experimental chambers, and with male Ss housed continually in the conditioning chambers or only placed in the chamber for brief daily sessions. Conditioning also resulted in shorter latencies to initiate copulation in males given access to a female following the signal light, in comparison with males that received access to a female unannounced by the light. Although some aspects of the conditioning experience were retained over a 6-wk interval, some loss of the behavior was also observed. The conditioned behavior also decreased with repeated extinction trials, during which the signal light was presented in the absence of access to a female conspecific. (19 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Increased density of somatostatin binding sites in respiratory nuclei of the brainstem in sudden infant death syndrome

We report the isolation and characterization of a Xenopus sequence, XNLRR-1, that is closely related to a gene for mouse neuronal leucine-rich repeat protein (NLRR-1). The cDNA clone is 4179 bp long and encodes a putative transmembrane glycoprotein of 718 amino acids, containing 12 leucine-rich repeats followed by one C2-type immunoglobulin-like domain and one fibronectin type-III repeat. XNLRR-1 is transcribed mainly in the developing eye area and the ventricular zone from diencephalon to hindbrain and slightly in spinal cord in Xenopus tadpoles. The similarity of the XNLRR-1 gene to other known cell adhesion molecules, together with the expression pattern, suggests that XNLRR-1 is involved in interactions at the neuronal cell surface.     

Social support for the bereaved: Recipients' and providers' perspectives on what is helpful.

Interviewed 40 people (mean age 44 yrs) who had lost a spouse and 54 people (mean age 42 yrs) who had lost a child in a motor vehicle accident 4–7 yrs earlier to gather information concerning support attempts from others that were helpful and unhelpful. Support attempts most frequently mentioned as helpful were contact with a similar other and opportunity to express feelings; those most frequently mentioned as unhelpful were giving advice and encouraging recovery. To understand better the unhelpful support attempts, comparisons were made with 100 control Ss' reports of what they would do or say to help a bereaved person. The possibility that unhelpful support attempts occur because people do not know what to say to bereaved persons seems implausible in view of the enlightened responses given by controls. The close correspondence between bereaved Ss' reports of how recovered they felt and control respondents' estimates of how recovered the bereaved would be suggests that unhelpful support attempts are not based on misconceptions about recovery. These findings indicate that factors inherent in the transaction between the bereaved and potential supporters should be addressed in future research concerned with understanding support attempts that fail. (40 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Substructured formulations of nonlinear structure problems – influence of the interface condition

We investigate the use of non‐overlapping domain decomposition (DD) methods for nonlinear structure problems. The classic techniques would combine a global Newton solver with a linear DD solver for the tangent systems. We propose a framework where we can swap Newton and DD so that we solve independent nonlinear problems for each substructure and linear condensed interface problems. The objective is to decrease the number of communications between subdomains and to improve parallelism. Depending on the interface condition, we derive several formulations that are not equivalent, contrarily to the linear case. Primal, dual and mixed variants are described and assessed on a simple plasticity problem. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Reusable knowledge in security requirements engineering: a systematic mapping study

Security is a concern that must be taken into consideration starting from the early stages of system development. Over the last two decades, researchers and engineers have developed a considerable number of methods for security requirements engineering. Some of them rely on the (re)use of security knowledge. Despite some existing surveys about security requirements engineering, there is not yet any reference for researchers and practitioners that presents in a systematic way the existing proposals, techniques, and tools related to security knowledge reuse in security requirements engineering. The aim of this paper is to fill this gap by looking into drawing a picture of the literature on knowledge and reuse in security requirements engineering. The questions we address are related to methods, techniques, modeling frameworks, and tools for and by reuse in security requirements engineering. We address these questions through a systematic mapping study. The mapping study was a literature review conducted with the goal of identifying, analyzing, and categorizing state-of-the-art research on our topic. This mapping study analyzes more than thirty approaches, covering 20 years of research in security requirements engineering. The contributions can be summarized as follows: (1) A framework was defined for analyzing and comparing the different proposals as well as categorizing future contributions related to knowledge reuse and security requirements engineering; (2) the different forms of knowledge representation and reuse were identified; and (3) previous surveys were updated. We conclude that most methods should introduce more reusable knowledge to manage security requirements.     

Apoptosis during ZIKA Virus Infection: Too Soon or Too Late?

Cell death by apoptosis is a major cellular response in the control of tissue homeostasis and as a defense mechanism in the case of cellular aggression such as an infection. Cell self-destruction is part of antiviral responses, aimed at limiting the spread of a virus. Although it may contribute to the deleterious effects in infectious pathology, apoptosis remains a key mechanism for viral clearance and the resolution of infection. The control mechanisms of cell death processes by viruses have been extensively studied. Apoptosis can be triggered by different viral determinants through different pathways as a result of virally induced cell stresses and innate immune responses. Zika virus (ZIKV) induces Zika disease in humans, which has caused severe neurological forms, birth defects, and microcephaly in newborns during the last epidemics. ZIKV also surprised by revealing an ability to persist in the genital tract and in semen, thus being sexually transmitted. Mechanisms of diverting antiviral responses such as the interferon response, the role of cytopathic effects and apoptosis in the etiology of the disease have been widely studied and debated. In this review, we examined the interplay between ZIKV infection of different cell types and apoptosis and how the virus deals with this cellular response. We illustrate a duality in the effects of ZIKV-controlled apoptosis, depending on whether it occurs too early or too late, respectively, in neuropathogenesis, or in long-term viral persistence. We further discuss a prospective role for apoptosis in ZIKV-related therapies, and the use of ZIKV as an oncolytic agent.     

Cosmeceutical Therapy: Engaging the Repercussions of UVR Photoaging on the Skin’s Circadian Rhythm

Sunlight is an important factor in regulating the central circadian rhythm, including the modulation of our sleep/wake cycles. Sunlight had also been discovered to have a prominent influence on our skin’s circadian rhythm. Overexposure or prolonged exposure to the sun can cause skin photodamage, such as the formation of irregular pigmentation, collagen degradation, DNA damage, and even skin cancer. Hence, this review will be looking into the detrimental effects of sunlight on our skin, not only at the aspect of photoaging but also at its impact on the skin’s circadian rhythm. The growing market trend of natural-product-based cosmeceuticals as also caused us to question their potential to modulate the skin’s circadian rhythm. Questions about how the skin’s circadian rhythm could counteract photodamage and how best to maximize its biopotential will be discussed in this article. These discoveries regarding the skin’s circadian rhythm have opened up a completely new level of understanding of our skin’s molecular mechanism and may very well aid cosmeceutical companies, in the near future, to develop better products that not only suppress photoaging but remain effective and relevant throughout the day.     

Hardware Implementation of Successive-Cancellation Decoders for Polar Codes

The recently-discovered polar codes are seen as a major breakthrough in coding theory; they provably achieve the theoretical capacity of discrete memoryless channels using the low-complexity successive cancellation decoding algorithm. Motivated by recent developments in polar coding theory, we propose a family of efficient hardware implementations for successive cancellation (SC) polar decoders. We show that such decoders can be implemented with O(N) processing elements and O(N) memory elements. Furthermore, we show that SC decoding can be implemented in the logarithmic domain, thereby eliminating costly multiplication and division operations, and reducing the complexity of each processing element greatly. We also present a detailed architecture for an SC decoder and provide logic synthesis results confirming the linear complexity growth of the decoder as the code length increases.     

Synthesis of hybrid TiO2 nanoparticles with well-defined poly(methyl methacrylate) and poly(tert-butyldimethylsilyl methacrylate) via the RAFT process

Surface of titania nanoparticles (TiO₂) was modified by a coupling agent as 3-(trimethoxysilyl)propyl methacrylate (MPS) to form TiO₂-MPS polymerizable particles. Methyl methacrylate (MMA) and tert-butyldimethylsilyl methacrylate (MASi) were radically polymerized through the immobilized vinyl bond on the surface in the presence of the reversible addition-fragmentation chain transfer (RAFT) agent 2-cyanoprop-2-yl dithiobenzoate using 2,2′-azobisisobutylnitrile (AIBN) as an initiator. FTIR spectroscopy confirmed the presence of the coupling molecule and the methacrylate groups on the surface. Thermogravimetric analysis and elemental analysis revealed a surface coverage of the coupling molecule of 2.0 wt%. TGA measurements showed that grafted PMMA and PMASi were accounted for 10% and 4.8% of the particle mass, respectively. ¹H NMR and SEC were used to verify the livingness of the polymerization. Transmission electron microscopy (TEM) was used to study the morphology of the particles before and after the surface grafting.