Garlic oil attenuates the cardiac apoptosis in hamster-fed with hypercholesterol diet

Hypercholesterolemia is a well established risk factor for cardiac cell apoptosis. The purpose of this study is to evaluate the effects of garlic oil on cardiac apoptosis induced by a hypercholesterol diet.Twenty-four male Golden-Syrian hamsters at 3 months of age were randomly divided into three groups, control, cholesterol and garlic oil groups received a chow diet, chow diet with 2% cholesterol, and chow diet with 2% cholesterol and 1% garlic oil for 8 weeks, respectively.The TUNEL-positive apoptotic cells, and several apoptotic proteins were significantly induced in the excised left ventricle in cholesterol group, whereas significant reduction was observed in cholesterol plus garlic oil group. The IGFI receptor dependent survival pathway was inhibited in cholesterol group whereas it was obviously reversed in cholesterol plus garlic oil group. Our results suggest that administration of garlic oil shows protective effects on cardiac apoptosis in rats with high cholesterol intake.     

Preparation and Properties of Water-Soluble PAA–PAS/SiO2 Hybrid Materials

Copolymers with different weight ratios of AA/PAS (acrylic acid/poly(DL-aspartic acid)) were synthesized and blended with sol-gel precursors to prepare water-soluble PAA–PAS/SiO₂ inorganic/organic hybrid materials. The PAS polymer or its copolymer in PAA–PAS/SiO₂ formed hydrogen bonds with SiO₂ and the amorphous structure of the hybrid material varied with the weight ratio of PAA. The hybrid materials exhibited enhanced thermal resistance over the copolymer alone. All hybrid materials were water-soluble and relatively insoluble in organic solvents.     

Improvement in uniformity of emission by ZrO₂ nano-particles for white LEDs

The high luminous efficiency and superior uniformity of angular-dependent correlated color temperature (CCT) white light-emitting diodes have been investigated by ZrO? nano-particles in a remote phosphor structure. By adding ZrO? nano-particles with silicone onto the surface of the phosphor layer, the capability of light scattering could be enhanced. In particular, the intensity of blue light at large angles was increased and the CCT deviations could be reduced. Besides, the luminous flux was improved due to the ZrO? nano-particles with silicone providing a suitable refractive index between air and phosphor layers. This novel structure reduces angular-dependent CCT deviations from 1000 to 420 K in the range of -70° to 70°. Moreover, the enhancement of lumen flux was increased by 2.25% at a driving current 120 mA, compared to a conventional remote phosphor structure without ZrO? nano-particles. Consequently, the ZrO? nano-particles in a remote phosphor structure could not only improve the uniformity of lighting but also increase the light output.     

Optomechanical model of surface micromachined tunableoptoelectronic devices

Linewidth is a critical performance parameter for many optoelectronic devices. We have developed a combined optical and mechanical simulation tool and demonstrate its application to micromachined vertical-cavity tunable optoelectronic devices. The deformation of the mirror surface is calculated from the area moment method. The optical field distribution is calculated by the Fox-Li method, and the diffraction losses are estimated from second-order perturbation theory. By comparison to experimental results, we find that the deformation of the central plate is well predicted by our theory. While deformation can be a major source of linewidth broadening in MEMS tunable optoelectronic devices, it is not the primary source in our devices     

The Kinetics of the Adsorption of Different Ester Type Polyols toward the Poly Ethylene Terephthalate Fiber

The adsorption kinetics of different ester types polyol toward polyethylene terephthalate (PET) fibers was studied and the solvent effect, the activation energy, adsorbing rate constant and amount of adsorption temperature and pH or addition of neutral salts were investigated in this paper. We found that the adsorption capacity of ester type polyols with double benzene rings (PTET400 and PTETE400) toward PET fibers is better than that of polyols with a single benzene ring (PT400 and PTE400). The adsorption for all polyols showed a two-step adsorption phenomenon. The first step is instant adsorption and the second step is diffusion adsorption. The diffusion adsorption is a first-order adsorption. The adsorption curves of diffusion adsorption for the same polyols under different LR (liquor ratio) of polyol aqueous solution toward PET fabrics were to cross in one point, when t=0. The adsorption rate (K) of polyols showed a linear relationship with the LR (liquor ratio) of solution. As for the absorption amounts, both amounts of instant and diffusion adsorption for all polyols showed a linear relationship with increase in temperature. The instant adsorption amount of the polyols with double benzene rings toward PET fibers is greater than that of polyols with a single benzene ring particularly under a lower pH. The addition of neutral salts had a positive effect on absorption. The order of adsorption activation energy for polyols toward PET fibers is PTE400 > PT400 > PTETE400 > PTET400. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Non-preemptive speed scaling

We consider the following offline variant of the speed scaling problem introduced by Yao et al. We are given a set of jobs and we have a variable-speed processor to process them. The higher the processor speed, the higher the energy consumption. Each job is associated with its own release time, deadline, and processing volume. The objective is to find a feasible schedule that minimizes the energy consumption. In contrast to Yao et al., no preemption of jobs is allowed. Unlike the preemptive version that is known to be in P, the non-preemptive version of speed scaling is strongly NP-hard. In this work, we present a constant factor approximation algorithm for it. The main technical idea is to transform the problem into the unrelated machine scheduling problem with $L_p$ -norm objective.     

All-optical 2R regeneration based on a compact self-seeded fabry-Pe/spl acute/rot laser diode with an embedded fiber Bragg grating

A cost-effective method, based on the injection-locking technique of a compact self-seeded Fabry-Pe/spl acute/rot laser diode with a 10-mm-long embedded fiber Bragg grating cavity, is proposed and experimentally compared with the two-mode injection-locked scheme for all-optical 2R regeneration at 10 Gb/s. Placing the presented all-optical 2R regenerator after a 50-km fiber significantly improves the transmission performance of a signal over 50- and 100-km fiber links. The power penalties at BER=10/sup -9/ are similar to those of the two-mode injection-locked scheme.     

A stabilized and tunable erbium-doped fiber ring laser with double optical filter

We have proposed and experimentally demonstrated a stabilized and tunable erbium-doped fiber ring laser by using a Fabry-Pe/spl acute/rot laser and a fiber Fabry-Pe/spl acute/rot filter. The sidemode suppression ratio of >30 dB/0.1 nm and the output power of >2.2 dBm can be achieved while this ring laser is tuned from 1528.28 to 1559.64 nm with the step of 1.12 nm. The wavelength variation of less than 0.01 nm and the power fluctuation of /spl les/0.04 dB have also been obtained. When the constant output power is controlled by adjusting the bias current of 980-nm pump laser, the power variation of less than /spl plusmn/0.05 dB can be obtained over the entire tunable range.     

Ant-Based Distributed Topology Control Algorithms for Mobile Ad hoc Networks

By adjusting the transmission power of mobile nodes, topology control aims to reduce wireless interference, reduce energy consumption, and increase effective network capacity, subject to connectivity constraints. In this paper, we introduce the Ant-Based Topology Control (ABTC) algorithm that adapts the biological metaphor of Swarm Intelligence to control topology of mobile ad hoc networks. ABTC is a distributed algorithm where each node asynchronously collects local information from nearby nodes, via sending and receiving ant packets, to determine its appropriate transmission power. The operations of ABTC do not require any geographical location, angle-of-arrival, topology, or routing information, and are scalable. In particular, ABTC attempts to minimize the maximum power used by any node in the network, or minimize the total power used by all of the nodes in the network. By adapting swarm intelligence as an adaptive search mechanism, ABTC converges quickly to a good power assignment with respect to minimization objectives, and adapts well to mobility. In addition, ABTC may achieve common power, or properly assign power to nodes with non-uniform distribution. Results from a thorough comparative simulation study demonstrate the effectiveness of ABTC for different mobility speed, various density, and diverse node distributions.This work is supported in part by National Science Foundation under grant ANI-0240398.Chien-Chung Shen received his B.S. and M.S. degrees from National Chiao Tung University, Taiwan, and his Ph.D. degree from UCLA, all in computer science. He was a research scientist at Bellcore Applied Research working on control and management of broadband networks. He is now an assistant professor in the Department of Computer and Information Sciences of the University of Delaware, and a recipient of NSF CAREER Award. His research interests include ad hoc and sensor networks, control and management of broadband networks, distributed object and peer-to-peer computing, and simulation.Zhuochuan Huang received his B.E. degree in Computer Science and Technology from Tsinghua University, P.R. China, in 1998, and his M.S. degree in Computer Science from University of Delaware in 2000. He is currently a PhD candidate with the Department of Computer and Information Sciences at the University of Delaware. His current research interests include the design and simulation of protocols for mobile ad hoc networks.Chaiporn Jaikaeo received his B.Eng degree in computer engineering from Kasetsart University, Thailand, and his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in computer and information sciences from the University of Delaware in 1996, 1999 and 2004, respectively. He is currently a lecturer in the Department of Computer Engineering at Kasetsart University. His research interests include unicast and multicast routing, topology control, peer-to-peer computing and network management for mobile wireless ad hoc and sensor networks.     

Protocol-independent multicast packet delivery improvement service for mobile Ad hoc networks

This paper addresses the issue of improving multicast packet delivery in mobile ad hoc networks and proposes an adaptive mechanism called Protocol-Independent Packet Delivery Improvement Service (PIDIS) to recover lost multicast packets. PIDIS provides its packet-delivery improvement services to any multicast routing protocol for mobile ad hoc networks by exploiting the mechanism of swarm intelligence to make intelligent decisions about where to fetch the lost multicast packets from. PIDIS is a gossip protocol, and nodes using PIDIS are only concerned with which neighbor nodes to gossip with to recover the most lost packets, rather than which member nodes to gossip with. Thus, it does not rely on membership information in a multicast scenario, which is often difficult to get. PIDIS employs the beneficial aspects of probabilistic routing and adapts well to mobility. PIDIS achieves probabilistic improvement in multicast packet delivery and, unlike other gossip-based schemes, does not need to maintain information about group members from which lost multicast packets are retrieved. Further, the operations of PIDIS do not rely on any underlying routing protocol or primitive, and can be incorporated into any ad hoc multicast routing protocol. We incorporated PIDIS over ODMRP [On-Demand Multicast Routing Protocol in Multihop Wireless Mobile Networks, Kluwer Mobile Networks and Applications, 2000], and compared it against Anonymous Gossip (AG) [International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems (ICDCS 2001) Phoenix, Arizona, April 2001] implemented over ODMRP, and ODMRP itself. Our simulation results show that ODMRP + PIDIS is more efficient and performs better than ODMRP + AG and ODMRP in terms of multicast packet delivery, end-to-end delay, and MAC layer overheads. We attribute the better performance and lower MAC overheads of ODMRP + PIDIS to the efficient gossiping made possible by using the swarm intelligence techniques.