Piperine, a major ingredient of black and long peppers, protects against AFB1-induced cytotoxicity and micronuclei formation in H4IIEC3 rat hepatoma cells

We studied the effect of piperine on the cytotoxicity and genotoxicity of aflatoxin B1 (AFB1) in rat hepatoma cells H4IIEC3/G-(H4IIE) using cellular growth and formation of micronuclei as endpoints. Piperine was earlier shown to inhibit cytochrome P-450-dependent aryl hydrocarbon hydroxylase and 7-methoxycoumarin demethylase activities in preparations of these cells with 1/2 maximum inhibition at 30-50 microM (Singh J. and Reen R.K., Current Science, 66, 365-369, 1994). The results of the present study showed that AFB1 inhibited the growth of H4IIE cells with an ED50 of 15 nM. Piperine markedly reduced the toxicity of the mycotoxin. Thus at 100 microM piperine largely restored the rate of growth of the cells. Likewise, piperine reduced the AFB1-induced formation of micronuclei in a concentration-dependent manner. Piperine itself was not toxic to the cells up to a concentration of almost 100 microM. The results suggest, that piperine is capable of counteracting AFB1 toxicity by suppressing cytochromes P-450 mediated bioactivation of the mycotoxin.     

Observability of Depth Estimation for a Hand‐Eye Robot System

This paper deals with the depth observability problem of a hand‐eye robot system. In contrast to earlier works, this paper presents a complete study of this observability problem. The velocity of the active camera in the hand‐eye robot system is considered as the input. The observability of depth estimation is then related to the velocity of the camera. A necessary and sufficient condition for the types of camera velocities necessary to ensure observability is found. This compensates for the results of earlier works, in which the velocity of camera was estimated. The theory is also verified by both simulations and experiments in this paper. Furthermore, a modified LQ visual servo control law is proposed to vary the weighting matrices so that depth estimation is improved while the level of control performance is still retained.     

Efficient formulations for the manipulator inertia matrix in terms of minimal linear combinations of inertia parameters

This article summarizes four formulations of the composite body method for the inertia matrix of a manipulator in the earlier works and presents a new formulation. These five formulations all use the first moments and the inertia tensors of composite bodies about the origin of the local frame. This paper also presents an algorithm for computing these first moments and inertia tensors. This algorithm utilizes a set of minimal linear combinations of inertia parameters instead of the natural inertia parameters, so that a number of redundant computations are saved. It is found that the new algorithm for the first moments and the inertia tensors of composite bodies is computationally superior to the others in the literature. On the other hand, two among the five formulations for the inertia matrix are more efficient than the other three as well as the others in the literature. The new formulation is one of these two most efficient formulations, and is specially adequate to a manipulator with some translational joints. ©1999 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.     

Effects of finite anisotropy parameter Q in the determination of magnetic bubble material parameters

Improved formulas are obtained to provide more accurate determination of magnetic bubble material parameters such as material length(l)and saturation magnetization(M_{s})based on the measurements of domain stripe width and bubble collapse field. The improvement takes into consideration the effects of finite uniaxial anisotropy parameter(Q)in the formulas. These improved formulas are based on the numerical results obtained from micromagnetic domain calculations of periodic stripes and of an isolated axisymmetric bubble.     

Niching with derandomized evolution strategies in artificial and real-world landscapes

We introduce a framework of derandomized evolution strategies (ES) niching techniques. A survey of these techniques, based on 5 variants of derandomized ES, is presented, based on the fixed niche radius approach. The core mechanisms range from the very first derandomized approach to self-adaptation of ES to the sophisticated Covariance Matrix Adaptation (CMA). They are applied to artificial as well as real-world multimodal continuous landscapes, of different levels of difficulty and various dimensions, and compared with the maximum-peak-ratio (MPR) performance analysis tool. While characterizing the performance of the different derandomized variants in the context of niching, some conclusions concerning the niching formation process of the different mechanisms are drawn, and the hypothesis of a trade-off between learning time and niching acceleration is numerically confirmed. Niching with (1 + λ)-CMA core mechanism is shown to experimentally outperform all the other variants, especially on the real-world problem. Some theoretical arguments supporting the advantage of a plus-strategy for niching are discussed. For the real-world application in hand, taken from the field of Quantum Control, we show that the niching framework can overcome some degeneracy in the search space, and obtain different conceptual designs using problem-specific diversity measurements.     

Preparation and properties of polyimide–clay nanocomposite materials for anticorrosion application

A series of polymer–clay nanocomposite (PCN) materials that consist of organosoluble polyimide and layered montmorillonite clay were prepared by the solution dispersion technique. The organosoluble polyimide containing non‐coplanar moiety in diamine monomer and flexible bridging linkages in dianhydride monomer was synthesized by chemical imidization. The as‐synthesized PCN materials were characterized by infrared spectroscopy, wide‐angle powder X‐ray diffraction, and transmission electron microscopy. The organosoluble polyimide showed better corrosion resistance compared to polyaniline, poly(o‐ethoxyaniline) and poly(methyl methacrylate) by using a series of standard electrochemical corrosion measurements of corrosion potential, polarization resistance, and corrosion current in 5 wt % aqueous NaCl electrolyte. Polyimide–clay nanocomposite materials incorporated with low loading of clay were found to further improve corrosion inhibition over pure polyimide. Effects of the material composition on the O₂/H₂O molecular permeability, optical clarity, and thermal properties of polyimide–clay nanocomposite materials were studied by molecular permeability analysis, UV–visible transmission spectra, thermogravimetric analysis, and differential scanning calorimetry, respectively. © 2004 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Appl Polym Sci 92: 3573–3582, 2004     

Polyacrylamide–clay nanocomposite materials prepared by photopolymerization with acrylamide as an intercalating agent

A series of nanocomposite materials consisting of water‐soluble polyacrylamide (PAA) and layered montmorillonite (MMT) clay platelets were prepared by the effective dispersion of the inorganic nanolayers of the MMT clay in the organic PAA matrix via in situ ultraviolet‐radiation polymerization. The acrylamide monomers functioned as both the intercalating agent and the reacting monomers. As a representative procedure for the preparation of the nanocomposites, organic acrylamide monomers were first intercalated into the interlayer regions of acrylamide‐treated organophilic clay hosts, and this was followed by one‐step ultraviolet‐radiation free‐radical polymerization with benzil as a photoinitiator. The as‐prepared polyacrylamide–clay nanocomposite (PCN) materials were subsequently characterized by Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy, wide‐angle powder X‐ray diffraction, and transmission electron microscopy. The effects of the material composition on the thermal stability, optical clarity, and gas‐barrier properties of pristine PAA and PCN materials, in the forms of fine powders and membranes, were also studied by differential scanning calorimetry, thermogravimetric analysis, ultraviolet–visible transmission spectroscopy, and gas permeability analysis. The molecular weights of PAA extracted from PCN materials and pristine PAA were determined by gel permeation chromatography with tetrahydrofuran as an eluant. © 2004 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Appl Polym Sci 91: 3489–3496, 2004     

BPM: Blended Piecewise Möbius Maps

We propose a novel Möbius interpolator that takes as an input a discrete map between the vertices of two planar triangle meshes, and outputs a continuous map on the input domain. The output map interpolates the discrete map, is continuous between triangles, and has low quasi-conformal distortion when the input map is discrete conformal. Our map leads to considerably smoother texture transfer compared to the alternatives, even on very coarse triangulations. Furthermore, our approach has a closed-form expression, is local, applicable to any discrete map, and leads to smooth results even for extreme deformations. Finally, by working with local intrinsic coordinates, our approach is easily generalizable to discrete maps between a surface triangle mesh and a planar mesh, i.e., a planar parameterization. We compare our method with existing approaches, and demonstrate better texture transfer results, and lower quasi-conformal errors.     

Unified Compression-Based Acceleration of Edit-Distance Computation

The edit distance problem is a classical fundamental problem in computer science in general, and in combinatorial pattern matching in particular. The standard dynamic programming solution for this problem computes the edit-distance between a pair of strings of total length O(N) in O(N ²) time. To this date, this quadratic upper-bound has never been substantially improved for general strings. However, there are known techniques for breaking this bound in case the strings are known to compress well under a particular compression scheme. The basic idea is to first compress the strings, and then to compute the edit distance between the compressed strings. As it turns out, practically all known o(N ²) edit-distance algorithms work, in some sense, under the same paradigm described above. It is therefore natural to ask whether there is a single edit-distance algorithm that works for strings which are compressed under any compression scheme. A rephrasing of this question is to ask whether a single algorithm can exploit the compressibility properties of strings under any compression method, even if each string is compressed using a different compression. In this paper we set out to answer this question by using straight line programs. These provide a generic platform for representing many popular compression schemes including the LZ-family, Run-Length Encoding, Byte-Pair Encoding, and dictionary methods. For two strings of total length N having straight-line program representations of total size n, we present an algorithm running in O(nNlg(N/n)) time for computing the edit-distance of these two strings under any rational scoring function, and an O(n ^2/3 N ^4/3) time algorithm for arbitrary scoring functions. Our new result, while providing a speed up for compressible strings, does not surpass the quadratic time bound even in the worst case scenario.     

Dietary supplementation with the inhibitory amino acid taurine suppresses autotomy in HA rats

Taurine is an inhibitory amino acid in the CNS. When supplied to rats it produces analgesia in some acute pain tests. Here we examined the effect of taurine supplementation on sensitivity to pain in intact rats, and whether perioperative dietary supplementation with taurine in rats would suppress autotomy, a behavior produced by peripheral neurectomy and related to neuropathic pain. Thermal pain sensitivity of intact rats consuming 1% taurine in the drinking solution for 2 weeks was not significantly different from that of control rats. Autotomy levels, determined in rats consuming taurine pre-, post- or perioperatively were significantly lower than in matching control groups. We conclude that taurine plays an important role in the autotomy model, presumably by protecting inhibitory neurons in the CNS against an excitotoxic damage triggered by injury discharge and ectopic input from the severed nerves.