Activation of auditory cortex during silent lipreading

Watching a speaker's lips during face-to-face conversation (lipreading) markedly improves speech perception, particularly in noisy conditions. With functional magnetic resonance imaging it was found that these linguistic visual cues are sufficient to activate auditory cortex in normal hearing individuals in the absence of auditory speech sounds. Two further experiments suggest that these auditory cortical areas are not engaged when an individual is viewing nonlinguistic facial movements but appear to be activated by silent meaningless speechlike movements (pseudospeech). This supports psycholinguistic evidence that seen speech influences the perception of heard speech at a prelexical stage.     

Psychological aspects of systemic lupus erythematosus: cognitive function, mood, and self-report

Previous studies have shown that Tetrahymena citrate synthase and the Tetrahymena 14-nm filament protein are encoded by a single gene and translated from one species of mRNA, and that they are identical in terms of molecular weight, antigenicity, and some enzymatic properties. In this study, using two-dimensional gel electrophoresis, we demonstrated that the citrate synthase comprised pI 7.7 and 8.0 isoforms, while the 14-nm filament protein comprised three isoforms with isoelectric points of 7.7, 8.0, and 8.4. The amino acid sequences of the NH2-terminal portions of all isoforms were identical and the peptide maps with V8 protease were almost the same. In addition, when the citrate synthase activity of each isoform was measured after separation by non-urea isoelectric focusing without denaturing treatment, the pI 7.7 and/or pI 8.0 isoforms exhibited the citrate synthase activity, but the pI 8.4 isoform only found for the 14-nm filament protein did not possess this activity. These results suggest that the polymorphism of these isoforms is caused by some posttranslational modifications, and that it may have resulted in the different compartmentalization and functions of Tetrahymena citrate synthase and the 14-nm filament protein.     

Optimal nonnegative color scanning filters

In this correspondence, the problem of designing color scanning filters for multi-illuminant color recording is considered. The filter transmittances are determined from a minimum-mean-squared orthogonal tristimulus error criterion that minimizes the color error in estimates obtained from noisy recorded data. Nonnegativity constraints essential for physical realizability are imposed on the filter transmittances. In order to demonstrate the significant improvements obtained, the resulting filters are compared with suboptimal filters reported in earlier literature.     

New strategies for separations through reactions

Separations through reactions can provide reliable and economically viable alternatives to established methods of separation, particularly for close boiling substances. New strategies in ‘Dissociation Extraction’ and ‘Dissociation Extractive Crystallization’ for separation of close boiling acidic/basic mixtures have been highlighted. Separations with aqueous solutions of hydrotrope and aqueous micellar solutions have been brought out. Separations by membranes with facilitated transport is potentially attractive. This paper is dedicated to Dr L K Doraiswamy on his sixtieth birthday.     

Background-subtraction using contour-based fusion of thermal and visible imagery

We present a new background-subtraction technique fusing contours from thermal and visible imagery for persistent object detection in urban settings. Statistical background-subtraction in the thermal domain is used to identify the initial regions-of-interest. Color and intensity information are used within these areas to obtain the corresponding regions-of-interest in the visible domain. Within each region, input and background gradient information are combined to form a Contour Saliency Map. The binary contour fragments, obtained from corresponding Contour Saliency Maps, are then fused into a single image. An A^* path-constrained search along watershed boundaries of the regions-of-interest is used to complete and close any broken segments in the fused contour image. Lastly, the contour image is flood-filled to produce silhouettes. Results of our approach are evaluated quantitatively and compared with other low- and high-level fusion techniques using manually segmented data.     

Importance of the Arg-Gly-Asp triplet in human thrombin for maintenance of structure and function

Site-directed mutagenesis was employed to assess the importance of the Arg-Gly-Asp triplet that comprises residues 197 to 199 in the B-chain of thrombin. Properties of the R197E and the D199E variants were compared with those of zeta-thrombin and the inactive S205A variant wherein the active site Ser is replaced by Ala. Relative to zeta-thrombin, the R197E thrombin variant under the assay conditions used exhibits 26% activity toward a small chromogenic substrate, 13% activity in the activation of protein C in the presence of thrombomodulin, < 3% activity in processing fibrinogen, and 1% activity in inducing platelet activation. Thus, the substrate specificity of thrombin was altered by the R197-->E replacement. The D199E variant was essentially inactive. It exhibited only 0.02% of the activity of thrombin toward the chromogenic substrate and its reactivity toward the active site-directed alkylating agent D-Phe-Pro-Arg-CH2Cl was 10,000-fold lower than that of thrombin. Like the inactive S205A thrombin variant, the D199E variant antagonized the interactions of thrombin with hirudin and thrombomodulin, but was a less effective antagonist. The dependence of the antagonism of the thrombin-thrombomodulin interaction on the concentration of D199E thrombin variant provided evidence suggesting the presence of two or more domains in thrombin that independently interact with their counterparts in thrombomodulin. Although the S205A thrombin variant antagonized the action of thrombin on platelets no such activity could be demonstrated for the D199E variant in the concentration range studied (< 800 nm). Comparison of the circular dichroism spectra of zeta-thrombin, the D199E, R197E, and S205A variants indicated that subtle differences in conformation exist between the D199E variant and the other thrombins. These differences in conformation might well account for the altered behavior of the D199E variant with respect to its interactions toward thrombomodulin, hirudin, and platelets.