Addressing the tertiary structure of human parathyroid hormone-(1-34)

Parathyroid hormone (PTH) regulates mineral metabolism and bone turnover by activating specific receptors located on osteoblastic and renal tubular cells and is fully functional as the N-terminal 1-34 fragment, PTH-(1-34). Previously, a "U-shaped" conformation with N- and C-terminal helices brought in close proximity by a turn has been postulated. The general acceptance of this hypothesis, despite limited experimental evidence, has altered the direction of the design of PTH-analogs. Examining the structure of human PTH-(1-34) under conditions that encompass the different environments the hormone may experience in the approach to and interaction with the G-protein-coupled receptor (including benign aqueous and saline solutions and in the presence of dodecylphosphocholine), we observe no evidence for a U-shape conformation or any tertiary structure. Instead, the N- and C-terminal helical domains, which vary in length and stability depending on the conditions, are separated by a highly flexible region of undefined conformation. These observations are in complete accord with recent conformational studies of PTH-related protein analogs containing lactams (Mierke, D. F., Maretto, S., Schievano, E. , DeLuca, D., Bisello, A., Mammi, S., Rosenblatt, M., Peggion, E., and Chorev, M. (1997) Biochemistry 36, 10372-10383) or a model amphiphilic alpha-helix (Pellegrini, M., Bisello, A., Rosenblatt, M., Chorev, M., and Mierke, D. F. (1997) J. Med. Chem. 40, 3025-3031). Reliable structural data from different environmental conditions are absolutely requisite for the next step in the design of non-peptide PTH analogs.     

Radiance-irradiance inversion algorithm for estimating the absorption and backscattering coefficients of natural waters: vertically stratified water bodies

A full multiple-scattering algorithm for inverting profiles of the upwelling and downwelling irradiances to yield profiles of the absorption and backscattering coefficients in a vertically stratified water body is described and tested with simulated data. The algorithm does not require knowledge of the scattering phase function of the medium. The results are better the closer the phase function assumed in the retrievals is to the true phase function, although excellent retrievals of the absorption coefficient can still be obtained with an inaccurate phase function. Simulations show that the algorithm is capable of determining the vertical structure of a stratified water body and usually provides the absorption coefficient profile with an error ?2% and the backscattering coefficient profile with an error ?10%, as long as the spacing between pseudodata samples is sufficiently small that the necessary derivatives of the irradiances can be accurately computed. The performance is only slightly degraded when the upwelling radiance (nadir viewing) is substituted for the upwelling irradiance.     

Optical designs for ultrahigh-flux infrared and solar energy collection: monolithic dielectric tailored edge-ray concentrators

A new class of optical designs is developed for attaining ultrahigh flux in infrared and solar energy concentrators. These concentrators are required to satisfy simultaneously three criteria: (1) being monolithic, i.e., comprising a single piece of dielectric such that no mirrored surfaces or air spaces between concentrator elements are introduced; (2) attaining at least 90% of the thermodynamic limit to concentration; and (3) being relatively compact, e.g., aspect ratios of the order of unity or less. Our inventions are rooted in the recently developed formalism of tailored edge-ray concentrators.     

Accuracy and efficacy of chest radiography in the intensive care unit

264 patients with cancer of larynx, 21 female and 234 male, had a testosterone and sex hormone binding globulin (SHBG) before the treatment in serum estimated. Because of dependence of levels of hormones the group of patients was divided into three following groups: "lower than standard", "standard", "higher than standard". The correlation between these groups and sex, age, localization of tumor, organs' advances, stage of morphological malignancy and type of cancer was reported. Anomalous values of testosterone were in male group more frequently reported. Anomalous values of SHBG were similar in male and female groups, but in the female group there was a significant majority of "lower than standard" values reported. The majority of abnormal values of testosterone and SHBG was described in groups of age higher than 50 years. There were no differences in testosterone and SHBG levels in different localization of tumors in larynx. In advanced stage T3 and T4 there were more frequent lower mean values of testosterone levels and higher values of SHBG levels in comparison to T2 stages. In tumors in G1 and G2 stages of histological malignancy higher levels of SHBG and higher mean levels of testosterone. The tumors in stage G3 the hormone levels were lowers were observed. The levels of SHBG in groups of carcinoma planoepitheliale keratodes were in 66% higher than in a group of carcinoma planoepitheliale akeratodes but in both groups the levels of testosterone were nearing the same. In group of patients with larynx cancer the negative correlation between the levels of testosterone and SHBG was not observed. Higher SHBG levels were not always accompanied by lower testosterone levels.     

Adaptive control of harmonic drive with parameter varying friction using structurally dynamic wavelet network

In this paper, an adaptive controller with structurally dynamic wavelet network is developed for a harmonic drive subject to parameter varying friction. The control architecture integrates a proportional controller, a feedback adaptive component and sliding component to adaptively compensate for the friction to achieve accurate position tracking. Global asymptotic stability of the algorithm is proved by using Lyapunov function. In parallel to the adaptive controller, a fuzzy reconfiguration scheme is devised to change the structure of the network along with weights updating to improve the system tracking performance and robustness. Experimental tests on a harmonic drive manipulator verify the effectiveness of the proposed control method.     

Wavefront raycasting using larger filter kernels for on-the-fly GPU gradient reconstruction

The quality of images generated by volume rendering strongly depends on the accuracy of gradient estimation. However, the most commonly used techniques for on-the-fly gradient reconstruction are still very simple, such as central differences; they generally gather only limited neighbourhood information and thus ultimately produce rather poor quality images. While there are many higher-order reconstruction methods, such as 3×3×3 or 5×5×5 filters, which can improve the quality, their excessive sampling costs have meant that they are generally used only for pre-computed gradients, which are then quantized and stored for later runtime re-interpolation. This may introduce further errors and, significantly, may consume valuable texture memory. In this paper, we address these issues by proposing a CUDA-based rendering framework that uses larger filter kernels for on-the-fly gradient computation in real-time raycasting applications. By using adaptive wavefront tracing, our approach can dramatically reduce the memory bandwidth requirements related to larger neighbour samples. To further ensure that samples are consumed wisely, we have devised a novel adaptive sampling scheme and a customized 3D mipmapping technique in the CUDA environment to sample at a proper level of detail as the ray recedes into the distance. We compared our technique with two previous state-of-the-art GPU raycasting algorithms and found that it achieves higher quality imaging and faster rendering performance across a variety of data sets than the previous methods.     

Superquadric glyphs for symmetric second-order tensors

Symmetric second-order tensor fields play a central role in scientific and biomedical studies as well as in image analysis and feature-extraction methods. The utility of displaying tensor field samples has driven the development of visualization techniques that encode the tensor shape and orientation into the geometry of a tensor glyph. With some exceptions, these methods work only for positive-definite tensors (i.e. having positive eigenvalues, such as diffusion tensors). We expand the scope of tensor glyphs to all symmetric second-order tensors in two and three dimensions, gracefully and unambiguously depicting any combination of positive and negative eigenvalues. We generalize a previous method of superquadric glyphs for positive-definite tensors by drawing upon a larger portion of the superquadric shape space, supplemented with a coloring that indicates the quadratic form (including eigenvalue sign). We show that encoding arbitrary eigenvalue magnitudes requires design choices that differ fundamentally from those in previous work on traceless tensors that arise in the study of liquid crystals. Our method starts with a design of 2-D tensor glyphs guided by principles of scale-preservation and symmetry, and creates 3-D glyphs that include the 2-D glyphs in their axis-aligned cross-sections. A key ingredient of our method is a novel way of mapping from the shape space of three-dimensional symmetric second-order tensors to the unit square. We apply our new glyphs to stress tensors from mechanics, geometry tensors and Hessians from image analysis, and rate-of-deformation tensors in computational fluid dynamics.     

High strain electromechanical actuators based on electrodeposited polypyrrole doped with di-(2-ethylhexyl)sulfosuccinate

The low-voltage electromechanical actuation of polypyrrole (PPy) doped with di-(2-ethylhexyl)sulfosuccinate (DEHS) has been investigated. The PPy-DEHS has been prepared both chemically (cast as films from solution) and by more conventional electrochemical polymerization. Very large strains of ∼30% were obtained during slow-scan redox cycling of the electrochemically prepared PPy-DEHS films. In constrast, PPy-DEHS films cast from solutions of the chemically polymerized polymer gave actuation strains of ∼2.5%. The polymerization method was also found to have a significant effect on the structure, conductivity and mechanical properties of the PPy-DEHS materials. The conductivity of the electrochemically polymerized PPy-DEHS was 75 S cm⁻¹, considerably higher than that found for the chemically derived polymer (7 S cm⁻¹). The structure of the PPy-DEHS was further elucidated from UV-vis, Raman and FT-IR spectral studies which indicated that the conjugation length of the PPy could be increased significantly by varying the polymerization method. Films obtained by casting chemically prepared PPy-DEHS showed higher modulus (2.3 GPa) than electropolymerized PPy-DEHS (0.6 GPa), but were more brittle. Both materials were electroactive in acetonitrile/water electrolyte. The higher actuation strain observed in the electrochemically prepared films was attributed to a more open molecular structure (as indicated by the lower modulus) allowing for easier ion diffusion and a higher conductivity allowing easier charge transfer.     

A note: Common due date assignment for a single machine scheduling with the rate-modifying activity

In this paper we study the single machine common due date assignment and scheduling problem with the possibility to perform a rate-modifying activity (RMA) for changing the processing times of the jobs following this activity. The objective is to minimize the total weighted sum of earliness, tardiness and due date costs. Placing the RMA to some position in the schedule can decrease the objective function value. Several properties of the problem are considered which in some cases can reduce the complexity of the solution algorithm.