Non-olfactorial discrimination between foods by the dog

Simple coagulation studies were carried out in 18 patients with advanced Trypanosoma gambiense infection. No evidence of disseminated intravascular coagulation was found. Many patients had a moderate degree of thrombocytopenia which may have been due to enhanced splenic trapping of platelets. Most patients had raised levels of fibrin degradation products in their cerebrospinal fluid, perhaps reflecting the presence of underlying cerebral and meningeal vascular damage. Addition of viable trypanosomes or of trypanosome extracts to human and rat blood did not produce significant thrombocytopenia in vitro.     

A comparative study of the analgesic and respiratory effects of N-allylnorcodeine (nalodeine), nalorphine, codeine and morphine

In this comparative study, the abdominal constriction test was used to determine analgesia in mice, and the body plethysmograph was used to study respiratory effects of nalodeine, nalorphine, naloxone, codeine, morphine and various agonist-antagonist combinations in rats. The analgesia dose-response curves for the surrogate pairs, nalodeine-nalorphine and codeine-morphine, were parallel but had significantly different slopes. Naloxone was a more potent antagonist of morphine and codeine than of nalorphine and nalodeine. In antagonizing morphine and codeine analgesia, naloxone was the most potent antagonist, nalorphine had a biphasic effect with decreasing activity at higher doses and nalodeine was not an antagonist. Moderate doses of nalorphrine depressed minute volume largely by their effect on tidal volume, but high doses stimulated respiratory rate and therefore had less effect on minute volume. Nalodeine depressed minute volume by depressing tidal volume, since all doses initially stimulated and then variably affected respiratory rate. Metabolic rate was not increased by either drug short of convulsant doses. Nalodeine depresses the ventilatory response to CO2 and weakly antagonizes the respiratory depressant actions of morphine.     

Inversion of the substrate specificity of yeast alcohol dehydrogenase

The relationship between the size of the substrate binding pocket and the catalytic reactivities with varied alcohols was studied with the Saccharomyces cerevisiae alcohol dehydrogenase I (ScADH) and compared with the liver enzymes from horse (EqADH, EE isoenzyme) and monkey (MmADH alpha, alpha-isoenzyme). The yeast enzyme is most active with ethanol, and its activity decreases as the size of the alcohol is increased, whereas the activities of the liver enzymes increase with larger alcohols. The substrate pocket in ScADH was enlarged by single substitutions of Thr-48 to Ser (T48S), Trp-57 to Met (W57M), and Trp-93 to Ala (W93A), and a double change, T48S:W93A, and a triple, T48S:W57M:W93A. The T48S enzyme has the same pattern of activity (V/K) as wild-type ScADH for linear primary alcohols. The W57M enzymes have lowered reactivity with primary and secondary alcohols. The W93A and T48S:W93A enzymes resemble MmADH alpha in having an inverted specificity pattern for primary alcohols, being 3- and 10-fold more active on hexanol and 350- and 540-fold less active on ethanol, and are as reactive as the liver enzymes with long chain primary alcohols. The three Ala-93 enzymes also acquired weak activity on branched chain alcohols and cyclohexanol.     

Selection and combination of acoustic features for the description of pathologic voices

The glottal to noise excitation ratio (GNE) is an acoustic measure designed to assess the amount of noise in a pulse train generated by the oscillation of the vocal folds. So far its properties have only been studied for synthesized signals, where it was found to be independent of variations of fundamental frequency (jitter) and amplitude (shimmer). On the other hand, other features designed for the same purpose like NNE (normalized noise energy) or CHNR (cepstrum based harmonics-to-noise ratio) did not show this independence. This advantage of the GNE over NNE and CHNR, as well as its general applicability in voice quality assessment, is now tested for real speech using a large group of pathologic voices (n = 447). A set of four acoustic features is extracted from a total of 22 mostly well-known acoustic voice quality measures by correlation analysis, mutual information analysis, and principal components analysis. Three of these measures are chosen to assess primarily different aspects of signal aperiodicity, while the fourth one indicates the noise content of the signal. All analysis methods lead to the same feature set that consists of a measure of period correlation, jitter, shimmer, and GNE. The two-dimensional projection of this set named "hoarseness diagram" allows a graphical illustration of voice quality that can be easily interpreted.