Failed Neuroprotection of Combined Inhibition of L-Type and ASIC1a Calcium Channels with Nimodipine and Amiloride

Effective pharmacological neuroprotection is one of the most desired aims in modern medicine. We postulated that a combination of two clinically used drugs—nimodipine (L-Type voltage-gated calcium channel blocker) and amiloride (acid-sensing ion channel inhibitor)—might act synergistically in an experimental model of ischaemia, targeting the intracellular rise in calcium as a pathway in neuronal cell death. We used organotypic hippocampal slices of mice pups and a well-established regimen of oxygen-glucose deprivation (OGD) to assess a possible neuroprotective effect. Neither nimodipine (at 10 or 20 µM) alone or in combination with amiloride (at 100 µM) showed any amelioration. Dissolved at 2.0 Vol.% dimethyl-sulfoxide (DMSO), the combination of both components even increased cell damage (p = 0.0001), an effect not observed with amiloride alone. We conclude that neither amiloride nor nimodipine do offer neuroprotection in an in vitro ischaemia model. On a technical note, the use of DMSO should be carefully evaluated in neuroprotective experiments, since it possibly alters cell damage.     

Extracting Light from Polymer Light‐Emitting Diodes Using Stamped Bragg Gratings

In this paper, we describe a method for increasing the external efficiency of polymer light‐emitting diodes (LEDs) by coupling out waveguided light with Bragg gratings. We numerically model the waveguide modes in a typical LED structure and demonstrate how optimizing layer thicknesses and reducing waveguide absorption can enhance the grating outcoupling. The gratings were created by a soft‐lithography technique that minimizes changes to the conventional LED structure. Using one‐dimensional and two‐dimensional gratings, we were able to increase the forward‐directed emission by 47 % and 70 %, respectively, and the external quantum efficiency by 15 % and 25 %.     

NMR studies of alkali C60 superconductors

The authors report¹³C,⁸⁷Rb,³⁹K, and¹³³Cs nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) measurements of lineshapes, Knight shifts, and spin-lattice relaxation rates in the normal and superconducting states of M₃C₆₀, where M₃ = Rb₃, K₃, Rb₂K, RbK₂, Rb₂Cs, and RbCs₂. Measurements are used as a guide to a new ammonia solvent synthesis technique. Temperature dependence of the superconducting state electron spin susceptibility is found to follow BCS weak coupling predictions. The issue of the Hebel-Slichter coherence peak is addressed.     

Lightweight graphics instrumentation for game state-specific power management in Android

Battery life is a major concern on portable devices like smartphones and tablet PCs. On these devices, games constitute the class of most popular applications and are at the same time highly compute-intensive. Every game consists of several states like the loading, main menu and the gaming state. Each of those states has its own workload characteristics, e.g., the loading phase is likely to be memory bound and the main menu state is less interactive than the gaming state. We propose an interception technique that allows to profile the game and detect its current state based on the game’s communication with the underlying OS. Current power management governors are unaware of the running applications and scale the processor’s voltage and frequency merely based on the system’s utilization. We provide the game’s state information and workload profile to our governor which selects the processing frequency such that the desired frame rate of the current state is ensured. This leads to an optimal choice of processing frequencies and thereby significantly reduces power consumption. We have implemented the scheme on an Android-based Samsung Galaxy Nexus smartphone using popular games like Jetpack Joyride and Temple Run. We reduced the CPU’s power consumption by up to 43.2 % compared to the Android interactive governor without impacting the gaming experience. Motivated by these results we propose a power management API that would allow game developers to significantly reduce the power consumption of their game using simple API calls.     

Impacts of new technologies on media usage and social behaviour in domestic environments

Technological infrastructure at home is changing continuously and is becoming increasingly interconnected. Media devices, including the TV set, provide access to the Internet and offer manifold opportunities to consume media on demand. Additionally, personal devices, such as smartphones, also enable flexible consumption and sharing of media. Questions about how these technologies change the user's media usage and how these changes affect the social structure of a household, however, remain largely unanswered. In order to gain insight into the adoption of new technologies into daily routines, we explored these changes in respect of people's media usage in a qualitative long-term Living Lab study. We will present findings regarding personal routines, flexible integration of new devices into existing practices, influences on households as social systems and related issues in device access and collective use. We will highlight potentials and conflicts regarding device shifts and roles; restrictions in device access; social influences in the living room; and individual changes in media consumption.     

Pressure effects on shear deformation of borosilicate glasses

The shear behaviors of two multicomponent borosilicate glasses, Borofloat®33 (Boro33) and N-BK7® (N-BK7), under different pressures are investigated using molecular dynamics simulations. The addition of alkali ions lowers the yield stress and changes the pressure dependence of shear modulus. Shear-induced densification is observed in both glasses. It is found that the decreases of the oxygen-centered bond angle and the coordination number change of B are responsible for the density changes at low pressures, and the increase of 5-coordinated Si is the dominant mechanism for densification at high pressures. The average shear stresses experienced by Si and B decrease with pressure except that the flow stress of Si at the end of shear deformation in N-BK7. Moreover, the average shear stress of B is more sensitive to the applied pressures compared to Si, suggesting that B is able to relax mechanical stress more easily under pressurized-shear. By analyzing the nonaffine displacement of atoms, it is found that N-BK7 exhibits more localized plastic deformation compared to Boro33 at low pressures and the local rearrangements in both glasses become more homogeneous with increasing pressure. The mean squared nonaffine displacement curves show that alkali ions have the highest mobility induced by shear compared to the network formers and B is more mobile than Si for both glasses. We also observed that plastic deformation tends to take place around boron atoms for Boro33, whereas it occurs in the alkali-rich regions for N-BK7, indicating that these two glasses have different atomic-scale deformation mechanisms.     

Atomic-scale mechanisms of densification in cold-compressed borosilicate glasses

Knowledge of the underlying structural response during deformation processes is essential for understanding the macroscopic mechanical response of glass. Here we present results from cold compression-decompression molecular dynamics (MD) simulations of two multicomponent borosilicate glasses, Borofloat^®33 (Boro33) and N-BK7^® (N-BK7). Our results suggest that the densification of these two borosilicate glasses involves different types of structural changes. The fraction of permanent densification can be correlated to the change in intermediate-range structure. By performing Voronoi analysis, we quantify the contributions to densification from different cation types in these two multicomponent borosilicate glasses, finding that 3-coordinated cations facilitate the densification process. Higher-coordinated cations are relatively stable and can even show a slight expansion in their Voronoi volume.     

Two CEGAR-based approaches for the safety verification of PLC-controlled plants

In this paper we address the safety analysis of chemical plants controlled by programmable logic controllers (PLCs). We consider a specification of the control program of the PLCs, extended with the specification of the dynamic plant behavior. The resulting hybrid models can be transformed to hybrid automata, for which advanced techniques for reachability analysis exist. However, the hybrid automata models are often too large to be analyzed. We propose two counterexample-guided abstraction refinement (CEGAR) approaches to keep the size of the hybrid models moderate.