Down-regulation of glial fibrillary acidic protein expression during acute lytic varicella-zoster virus infection of cultured human astrocytes

The effects of the varicella-zoster virus (VZV) OKA vaccine strain in producing morphologic and antigenic changes in dissociated cultures of human fetal brain was investigated. Cultures containing 80% glial acidic fibrillary protein (GFAP), GFAP+ (positive) astrocytes and 20% GFAP- (negative) fibroblastic-like cells were infected with cell-free VZV OKA at a multiplicity of infection of 0.1 plaque-forming units per cell. Cytopathic effects and significant viral antigen labeling with antibodies against VZV gpl and immediate-early (IE) protein 62 were first detected 6 to 7 days postinfection. Several observations indicated that astrocyte GFAP expression was altered and diminished as a result of VZV infection itself, thereby raising doubts about the utility of combining cell markers and viral antigenic labeling in assessing the susceptibility of neural cell types to viral infection. The down-regulation of GFAP expression by VZV appears to be mediated by early rather than late events in the viral replication cycle and may not be the result of virally induced global shut-off of host cell protein synthesis. Similar observations were made using VZV Ellen, a multipassaged, nonvaccine strain. These observations have potential in vivo implications related to histologic analysis of VZV-infected tissues and disease pathogenesis.     

Effects of cold stress on survival and reproduction of Haematobia irritans (Diptera: Muscidae)

1. Hydroxypropyl-beta-cyclodextrin (HP-beta-CD) increases the stability of the oxazolidine prodrug toward hydrolysis. 2. The binding constant (Kb) and rate constant (Kc) for the hydrolysis of the prodrug-HP-beta-CD complex were calculated from the kinetic data. 3. Ion-spray mass spectra confirmed prodrug-HP-beta-CD complexation. 4. Mass spectral and kinetic data indicated 1:1 stoichiometry for the complex. 5. A significant elevation of locomotor activity in rats was observed when either (-)-ephedrine or the prodrug was administered by either the intraperitoneal or the oral route. 6. Addition of HP-beta-CD potentiated the central nervous system effect of both (-)-ephedrine and the prodrug when administered intraperitoneally. However, when the drugs were administered orally, HP-beta-CD caused a decrease in activity.     

Identification of domains involved in superantigenicity of streptococcal pyrogenic exotoxin F (SpeF)

Coronary artery angioplasty or bypass is being performed for increasing numbers of patients in their seventh, eighth, ninth and even tenth decades of life. Because of the cost involved, justification for performing these procedures in the elderly has become a topic of daily discussion among those responsible for funding healthcare. Both silent and overt coronary artery disease (CAD) are more common in the population over 65 years of age. Because CAD in the elderly often presents in an atypical manner, diagnosis of the disease is frequently delayed. Partly because of the delayed diagnosis and partly because of cost considerations, coronary arterial bypass (CABG) is more often performed as an emergency procedure in the elderly with the results that both operative mortality and costs are increased over those observed in a younger population. Nevertheless, it is clear that performance of coronary revascularization procedures in the elderly can both prolong life and improve the quality of life beyond what can be achieved using alternative methods of treatment. Greater efforts directed toward detection of ischemic heart disease in the these patients and earlier, elective surgery could significantly reduce both the mortality and disability associated with CAD in the elderly.     

A CCG repeat polymorphism adjacent to the CAG repeat in the Huntington disease gene: implications for diagnostic accuracy and predictive testing

STUDY HYPOTHESIS: Concentrated aqueous solutions of hydroxocobalamin (OHCob) are given intravenously for the treatment of cyanide poisoning. Because OHCob solutions are intensely red and have peak light absorptions at 352 nm and 525 nm, we investigated whether the presence of OHCob in serum would interfere with various automated, colorimetric chemistry measurements. DESIGN: Selected serum chemistry colorimetric measurements were compared in seven patients, using their own serum as control, with serum containing OHCob at the following concentrations: 100 mg/L, 500 mg/L, and 1,000 mg/L. These concentrations are in the range achieved with therapeutic doses of OHCob when given for cyanide poisoning. MEASUREMENTS AND MAIN RESULTS: Statistically significant alterations in serum values for aspartate aminotransferase, total bilirubin, creatinine, magnesium, and iron were seen in the presence of OHCob. CONCLUSION: The presence of OHCob in serum interferes with several chemistry methodologies, and such interference should be anticipated when this antidote is used.     

Scheduling Optimization Modelling: A Case Study of a Woven Label Manufacturing Company

Production scheduling involves all activities of building production schedules, including coordinating and assigning activities to each person, group of people, or machine and arranging work orders in each workplace. Production scheduling must solve all problems such as minimizing customer wait time, storage costs, and production time; and effectively using the enterprise’s human resources. This paper studies the application of flexible job shop modelling on scheduling a woven labelling process. The labelling process includes several steps which are handled in different work-stations. Each workstation is also comprised of several identical parallel machines. In this study, job splitting is allowed so that the power of work stations can be utilized better. The final objective is to minimize the total completion time of all jobs. The results show a significant improvement since the new planning may save more than 60% of lead time compared to the current schedule. The contribution of this research is to propose a flexible job shop model for scheduling a woven labelling process. The proposed approach can also be applied to support complex production scheduling processes under fuzzy environments in different industries. A practical case study demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed model.     

Investigation of long term drift of an intraocular pressure sensor

Microsystem Technologies - “Zero drift” behavior of an optical intraocular pressure sensor is studied using an analytical model based on the deflection of a circular membrane. Results...     

Electrodeposition of Fe−Ni−Co alloys part I: Direct current deposition

Effects of hydrodynamic conditions, current density and solution temperature on the d.c. electrodeposition of Fe–Ni–Co alloys have been investigated with stationary planar and rotating cylindrical electrodes. The deposition rate of Fe showed mass transfer effects at cathodic potentials –1.35 V/sce. Deposition of Ni appeared to be kinetically controlled; deposition of Co appeared to be under kinetic control at potentials –1.35 V/sce but under mixed control at –1.65 V. Current efficiency of the codeposition process increased with increasing current density and decreased with increasing rotation rate. Higher solution temperatures and rotation rates extended the applied current density range where smooth, adherent, and metallic-looking deposits could be obtained. An increase in solution temperatures also decreased anomalous codeposition of Fe–Ni–Co. Calculations based on the Hessami-Tobias model provide qualitative agreement with dependence of experimental electrodeposition on applied current density, hydrodynamics and temperature.     

Faceless identification based on temporal strips

This paper first presents a novel approach for modelling facial features, Local Directional Texture (LDT), which exploits the unique directional information in image textures for the problem of face recognition. A variant of LDT with privacy-preserving temporal strips (TS) is then considered to achieve faceless recognition with a higher degree of privacy while maintaining high accuracy. The TS uses two strips of pixel blocks from the temporal planes, XT and YT, for face recognition. By removing the reliance on spatial context (i.e., XY plane) for this task, the proposed method withholds facial appearance information from public view, where only one-dimensional temporal information that varies across time are extracted for recognition. Thus, privacy is assured, yet without impeding the facial recognition task which is vital for many security applications such as street surveillance and perimeter access control. To validate the reliability of the proposed method, experiments were carried out using the Honda/UCSD, CK+, CAS(ME)² and CASME II databases. The proposed method achieved a recognition rate of 98.26% in the standard video-based face recognition database, Honda/UCSD. It also offers a 81.92% reduction in the dimension length required for storing the extracted features, in contrast to the conventional LBP-TOP.

     

A Nom historical document recognition system for digital archiving

A Nom historical document recognition system is being developed for digital archiving that uses image binarization, character segmentation, and character recognition. It incorporates two versions of off-line character recognition: one for automatic recognition of scanned and segmented character patterns (7660 categories) and the other for user handwritten input (32,695 categories). This separation is used since including less frequently appearing categories in automatic recognition increases the misrecognition rate without reliable statistics on the Nom language. Moreover, a user must be able to check the results and identify the correct categories from an extended set of categories, and a user can input characters by hand. Both versions use the same recognition method, but they are trained using different sets of training patterns. Recursive X–Y cut and Voronoi diagrams are used for segmentation; k–d tree and generalized learning vector quantization are used for coarse classification; and the modified quadratic discriminant function is used for fine classification. The system provides an interface through which a user can check the results, change binarization methods, rectify segmentation, and input correct character categories by hand. Evaluation done using a limited number of Nom historical documents after providing ground truths for them showed that the two stages of recognition along with user checking and correction improved the recognition results significantly.     

Cryptanalysis of simple three-party key exchange protocol (S-3PAKE)

Password-authenticated key exchange (PAKE) protocols allow parties to share secret keys in an authentic manner based on an easily memorizable password. Recently, Lu and Cao proposed a three-party password-authenticated key exchange protocol, so called S-3PAKE, based on ideas of the Abdalla and Pointcheval two-party SPAKE extended to three parties. S-3PAKE can be seen to have a structure alternative to that of another three-party PAKE protocol (3PAKE) by Abdalla and Pointcheval. Furthermore, a simple improvement to S-3PAKE was proposed very recently by Chung and Ku to resist the kind of attacks that applied to earlier versions of 3PAKE. In this paper, we show that S-3PAKE falls to unknown key-share attacks by any other client, and undetectable online dictionary attacks by any adversary. The latter attack equally applies to the recently improved S-3PAKE. Indeed, the provable security approach should be taken when designing PAKEs; and furthermore our results highlight that extra cautions still be exercised when defining models and constructing proofs in this direction.