Exposure to virtual nature: the impact of different immersion levels on skin conductance level,heart rate,and perceived relaxation

Virtual Reality - It is generally accepted that natural environments reduce stress and improve mood. Since access to natural environments is sometimes limited, virtual natural environments,...     

Approximation of sleep duration and sleep efficiency using actography

The actography is a cost-effective semiobjective method to measure sleep/wake-cycles. This is the reason why the actography should be used first. The actography is after the cost-intensive polysomnography the best method in diagnosis of sleep disorders and monitoring of sleep disorder therapy. Actography over several days allows a precise estimation of total sleep time and sleep efficiency and makes possible an analysis of sleep/wake in natural conditions. The estimation is better if the patient is in high wake body activity and the recording time is longer. The mean values of total sleep time and sleep efficiency from polysomnography and actography are congruent.     

Heat destruction of Salmonella in poultry feed: effect of time, temperature, and moisture

Presentation of our experience in three cases of urocolpos (acquired pudendal lip fusion), a series numerically equivalent to the total number of cases published until now. All patients in our series were older women and presented complete fusion of the small pudendal lips, with only a small pointed puncture in the lower part of the vulva. The main clinical signs and symptoms in our series were: urinary infection in 100%, false incontinence in 66% due to output of urine retained in the vagina, a symptom that has not been described earlier, and acute urine retention in 33%. All patients were successfully treated by means of surgical loosening of the fusioned lips and application of topical estrogens. An analysis is made of clinical and pathoanatomical features which differentiate this entity from the sclerotic and atrophic lichen. Finally, an etiopathogenic hypothesis is raised to explain the fusion acquired by the small pudendal lips in the urocolpos.     

Chronically Elevated Exogenous Glucose Elicits Antipodal Effects on the Proteome Signature of Differentiating Human iPSC-Derived Pancreatic Progenitors

The past decade revealed that cell identity changes, such as dedifferentiation or transdifferentiation, accompany the insulin-producing β-cell decay in most diabetes conditions. Mapping and controlling the mechanisms governing these processes is, thus, extremely valuable for managing the disease progression. Extracellular glucose is known to influence cell identity by impacting the redox balance. Here, we use global proteomics and pathway analysis to map the response of differentiating human pancreatic progenitors to chronically increased in vitro glucose levels. We show that exogenous high glucose levels impact different protein subsets in a concentration-dependent manner. In contrast, regardless of concentration, glucose elicits an antipodal effect on the proteome landscape, inducing both beneficial and detrimental changes in regard to achieving the desired islet cell fingerprint. Furthermore, we identified that only a subgroup of these effects and pathways are regulated by changes in redox balance. Our study highlights a complex effect of exogenous glucose on differentiating pancreas progenitors characterized by a distinct proteome signature.     

Biosynthesis and identification of volatiles released by the myxobacterium Stigmatella aurantiaca

The volatiles released by agar plate cultures of two strains of the myxobacterium Stigmatella aurantiaca (strains Sg a15 and DW4/3-1) were collected in a closed-loop stripping apparatus (CLSA) and analyzed by GC-MS. Large numbers of substances from different compound classes (ketones, esters, lactones, terpenes, and sulfur and nitrogen compounds) were identified; several of them are reported from natural sources for the first time. The volatiles 2-methyltridecan-4-one (17), its isomer 3-methyltridecan-4-one (20), and the higher homologue 2-methyltetradecan-4-one (18) were identified in the extracts of both strains and were synthesized. In addition, strain Sg a15 produced 2,12-dimethyltridecan-4-one (19), 2-methyltridec-2-en-4-one (23), and a series of phenyl ketones, among them 1-phenyldecan-1-one (14) and 9-methyl-1-phenyldecan-1-one (16), whereas strain DW4/3-1 emitted traces of 10-methylundecan-2-one (21). The biosynthesis of 14 and 16 was examined in feeding experiments with deuterated precursors carried out on agar plate cultures. The leucine-derived starter unit isovalerate was shown to be incorporated into 16, as was phenylalanine-derived benzoic acid into both 14 and 16. The results point to formation both of the phenyl ketones and of the structurally related aliphatic ketones through an unusual head-to-head coupling between a starter unit such as benzoyl-CoA and a fatty acyl-CoA, followed by decarboxylation.     

Thermal cure monitoring of phenolic resole resins based on in situ fluorescence technique

The thermal curing reaction of two phenolic resole resins is monitored using the fluorescence technique. The intrinsic fluorescence can be used as an indicator for cure monitoring for the first resole. As the thermal curing proceeds, the intrinsic fluorescence intensity of the resole resin decreases and exhibits a few nanometers of redshift. The fluorescence intensity of the emission maxima is correlated with the conversion measured by differential scanning spectroscopy. A linear correlation is found at three different temperatures. The intrinsic fluorescence cannot always be used for monitoring the curing process of phenolic resole resins. Thus, three intramolecular charge transfer compounds and two organic donor–π‐acceptor salts are selected and applied for the cure monitoring of the second phenolic resole resin. As the curing reaction proceeds, the fluorescence emission spectra of the probes exhibit a blue spectral shift and the intensity changes because of environmental changes. An intensity ratio method is applied in which the ratios of the low‐ to high‐intensity changes in the emission bands are used to determine the degree of the curing process. There is a smooth correlation between the intensity ratio method and the degree of cure. The method enables one to follow the changes in the polymer structure at low and intermediate degrees of the curing process (below 70%) and obtain comparable results from different types of probes during the same curing process. © 2002 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Appl Polym Sci 83: 1773–1780, 2002     

Deformation and Fracture of Micron‐Sized Metal‐Coated Polymer Spheres: An In Situ Study

In situ imaging and analysis of the mechanical behavior of micron‐sized metal‐coated polymer particles under compression is reported. A nanoindentation set‐up mounted in a scanning electron microscope is used to observe the deformation and fracture of 10 μm polymer spheres with Ni, Ni/Au, Au, and Ag coatings. The spheres fracture in one of two metallization‐dependent modes, brittle, and ductile, depending only on the presence of a nickel layer. The metal coating always fractures parallel to the direction of compression. The mechanical properties up to the point of coating fracture are rate‐dependent due to the viscoelastic polymer core. Metal‐coated polymer spheres are an important composite material in electronics packaging, and this study demonstrates a novel method of evaluating the mechanical properties of particles to tailor them for electronic materials.

     

Latent classification models for binary data

One of the simplest, and yet most consistently well-performing set of classifiers is the naïve Bayes models (a special class of Bayesian network models). However, these models rely on the (naïve) assumption that all the attributes used to describe an instance are conditionally independent given the class of that instance. To relax this independence assumption, we have in previous work proposed a family of models, called latent classification models (LCMs). LCMs are defined for continuous domains and generalize the naïve Bayes model by using latent variables to model class-conditional dependencies between the attributes. In addition to providing good classification accuracy, the LCM has several appealing properties, including a relatively small parameter space making it less susceptible to over-fitting. In this paper we take a first step towards generalizing LCMs to hybrid domains, by proposing an LCM for domains with binary attributes. We present algorithms for learning the proposed model, and we describe a variational approximation-based inference procedure. Finally, we empirically compare the accuracy of the proposed model to the accuracy of other classifiers for a number of different domains, including the problem of recognizing symbols in black and white images.     

Interactive visual analysis of contrast-enhanced ultrasound data based on small neighborhood statistics

Contrast-enhanced ultrasound (CEUS) has recently become an important technology for lesion detection and characterization in cancer diagnosis. CEUS is used to investigate the perfusion kinetics in tissue over time, which relates to tissue vascularization. In this paper we present a pipeline that enables interactive visual exploration and semi-automatic segmentation and classification of CEUS data.For the visual analysis of this challenging data, with characteristic noise patterns and residual movements, we propose a robust method to derive expressive enhancement measures from small spatio-temporal neighborhoods. We use this information in a staged visual analysis pipeline that leads from a more local investigation to global results such as the delineation of anatomic regions according to their perfusion properties. To make the visual exploration interactive, we have developed an accelerated framework based on the OpenCL library, that exploits modern many-cores hardware. Using our application, we were able to analyze datasets from CEUS liver examinations, being able to identify several focal liver lesions, segment and analyze them quickly and precisely, and eventually characterize them.