Chromosome comparison between populations of the collared peccary, Tayassu tajacu, raised in captivity

The collared peccary (Tayassu tajacu) is widely distributed over the American continent, being found from the south of the USA to the north of Argentina. In Brazil, it is spread all over the country, being one of the potential species to be raised in captivity. Therefore, the cytogenetic techniques could be a potential tool for reproductive monitoring of animals raised in captivity, mainly when destined for commercial purposes. This study had the objective of determining the chromosome number of two populations raised in captivity and characterizing them by GTG banding. For this purpose, an analysis was made of mitotic metaphases obtained from lymphocyte cultures made from blood samples of 11 animals, six of which from the Northeast and five from the North of Brazil. The results of this analysis showed the same karyotype pattern for the species (2n=30 chromosomes and NF=48), besides corresponding to the South American pattern of the species, i.e., without a translocation between autosomes 1 and 8, chromosome X acrocentric, and no differences were found between the two populations studied. However, chromosomal polymorphisms were observed compared to data from the literature on populations from North and South America.     

Multicluster,mobile, multimedia radio network

A multi-cluster, multi-hop packet radio network architecture for wireless adaptive mobile information systems is presented. The proposed network supports multimedia traffic and relies on both time division and code division access schemes. This radio network is not supported by a wired infrastructure as conventional cellular systems are. Thus, it can be instantly deployed in areas with no infrastructure at all. By using a distributed clustering algorithm, nodes are organized into clusters. The clusterheads act as local coordinators to resolve channel scheduling, perform power measurement/control, maintain time division frame synchronization, and enhance the spatial reuse of time slots and codes. Moreover, to guarantee bandwidth for real time traffic, the architecture supports virtual circuits and allocates bandwidth to circuits at call setup time. The network is scalable to large numbers of nodes, and can handle mobility. Simulation experiments evaluate the performance of the proposed scheme in static and mobile environments.This work was supported by the U.S. Department of Justice/Federal Bureau of Investigation, ARPA/CSTO under Contract J-FBI-93-112 Computer Aided Design of High Performance Wireless Networked Systems.     

Gamma irradiation of PolyEthyleneTerephthalate and PolyEthyleneNaphthalate

The effect of gamma irradiation in air is investigated in two thermoplastic polyesters (PET and PEN), in order to evaluate the influence of aromatic density and the role of oxygen on radiation resistance. EPR measurements were carried out to detect radical stability against oxygen permeation and to provide radical characterization. Viscometric data reveal a different behaviour between films and thick samples. Positron annihilation spectra show a decrease of ortho-positronium intensity, which is more marked in film samples. ortho-positronium lifetime does not depend on the radiation dose.     

Visual gap and offset discrimination and its relation to categorical identification in brief line-element displays.

Visual processing was investigated in judgments of relative line position. Stimulus continua were generated by bisecting a straight line and displacing the segments. Experiment 1 measured discrimination of pairs of longitudinally displaced segments at equal steps along the continuum. At long (2 s) durations discrimination fell smoothly, but at short (100 ms) durations it was sharp-peaked. In Experiment 2 the short-duration stimuli were labeled with subsets of the labels no gap, just a gap, and more than just a gap. Theoretical discrimination performances were computed and the one based on no gap and just a gap closely fitted observed performance. Experiments 3 and 4 were similar to 1 and 2, with lateral replacing longitudinal displacement. Similar "categorical" performance was obtained. It was concluded that there are discrete mechanisms for early detection of relative line position and that 2 labels can be used to characterize performance in each direction. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Uncertainty in health risk analysis

This paper discuss several quantitative issues that arise in the analysis of health risks, beginning with principles such as de minimis and zero-risk. The paper also provides a probabilistic definition of risk in terms of hazard, context, consequence, magnitude, and uncertainty. The example relies on this definition to investigate, through sensitivity analysis, the effect that uncertainty has on the results obtained. The results, from a case study based on waterborne total arsenic, show that the choice of dose—response functions causes more uncertainty than any other component of risk analysis. Chemical carcinogenesis provides the basis for discussing inability to know as well as uncertainty. The conclusion is that risk analysis keeps uncertainty and inability to know separate; through this function, it provides a much needed method to present information to decision makers and the public.     

The philosophical technologies

The thesis of this paper is that ethics and action theory are the two philosophical branches of technology. The reason is that they, just like mechanical engineering and management science, are concerned with human action. But of course there are differences between the philosophical technologies and the others, among them their degree of generality. An example from ethics and another from praxiology are discussed, to show that these disciplines can be just as exact and relevant to real contemporary life as electrical engineering and law. Finally, some consequences for the classification of technologies and for the design of academic curricula are drawn.     

The GPU on the simulation of cellular computing models

Membrane Computing is a discipline aiming to abstract formal computing models, called membrane systems or P systems, from the structure and functioning of the living cells as well as from the cooperation of cells in tissues, organs, and other higher order structures. This framework provides polynomial time solutions to NP-complete problems by trading space for time, and whose efficient simulation poses challenges in three different aspects: an intrinsic massively parallelism of P systems, an exponential computational workspace, and a non-intensive floating point nature. In this paper, we analyze the simulation of a family of recognizer P systems with active membranes that solves the Satisfiability problem in linear time on different instances of Graphics Processing Units (GPUs). For an efficient handling of the exponential workspace created by the P systems computation, we enable different data policies to increase memory bandwidth and exploit data locality through tiling and dynamic queues. Parallelism inherent to the target P system is also managed to demonstrate that GPUs offer a valid alternative for high-performance computing at a considerably lower cost. Furthermore, scalability is demonstrated on the way to the largest problem size we were able to run, and considering the new hardware generation from Nvidia, Fermi, for a total speed-up exceeding four orders of magnitude when running our simulations on the Tesla S2050 server.     

The construction of cubature formulae for a family of integrals: A bifurcation problem

Cubature formulae of degree 11 with minimal numbers of knots for the integral $$\int\limits_{ - 1}^1 { \int\limits_{ - 1}^1 {(1 - x^2 )^\alpha } } (1 - y^2 )^\alpha f(x,y) dxdy \alpha > - 1$$ which are invariant under rotation over an angle π/2 are determined by a system of 18 nonlinear equations in 18 unknowns. We start with a known solution for this system for α=0. By varying α smoothly, the knots and weights of the cubature formula vary smoothly except in the singular solutions such as turning points and bifurcation points where new solutions branches arise. We use for this purpose the program AUTO. We obtain surprisingly many branches of cubature formulae.     

Complementary Effects of Carbamylated and Citrullinated LL37 in Autoimmunity and Inflammation in Systemic Lupus Erythematosus

LL37 acts as T-cell/B-cell autoantigen in Systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE) and psoriatic disease. Moreover, when bound to “self” nucleic acids, LL37 acts as “danger signal,” leading to type I interferon (IFN-I)/pro-inflammatory factors production. T-cell epitopes derived from citrullinated-LL37 act as better antigens than unmodified LL37 epitopes in SLE, at least in selected HLA-backgrounds, included the SLE-associated HLA-DRB1*1501/HLA-DRB5*0101 backgrounds. Remarkably, while “fully-citrullinated” LL37 acts as better T-cell-stimulator, it loses DNA-binding ability and the associated “adjuvant-like” properties. Since LL37 undergoes a further irreversible post-translational modification, carbamylation and antibodies to carbamylated self-proteins other than LL37 are present in SLE, here we addressed the involvement of carbamylated-LL37 in autoimmunity and inflammation in SLE. We detected carbamylated-LL37 in SLE-affected tissues. Most importantly, carbamylated-LL37-specific antibodies and CD4 T-cells circulate in SLE and both correlate with disease activity. In contrast to “fully citrullinated-LL37,” “fully carbamylated-LL37” maintains both innate and adaptive immune-cells’ stimulatory abilities: in complex with DNA, carbamylated-LL37 stimulates plasmacytoid dendritic cell IFN-α production and B-cell maturation into plasma cells. Thus, we report a further example of how different post-translational modifications of a self-antigen exert complementary effects that sustain autoimmunity and inflammation, respectively. These data also show that T/B-cell responses to carbamylated-LL37 represent novel SLE disease biomarkers.