Bilirubin toxicity to the central nervous system (CNS) is responsible for severe and permanent neurologic damage, resulting in hearing loss, cognitive, and movement impairment. Timely and effective management of severe neonatal hyperbilirubinemia by phototherapy or exchange transfusion is crucial for avoiding permanent neurological consequences, but these therapies are not always possible, particularly in low-income countries. To explore alternative options, we investigated a pharmaceutical approach focused on protecting the CNS from pigment toxicity, independently from serum bilirubin level. To this goal, we tested the ability of curcumin, a nutraceutical already used with relevant results in animal models as well as in clinics in other diseases, in the Gunn rat, the spontaneous model of neonatal hyperbilirubinemia. Curcumin treatment fully abolished the landmark cerebellar hypoplasia of Gunn rat, restoring the histological features, and reverting the behavioral abnormalities present in the hyperbilirubinemic rat. The protection was mediated by a multi-target action on the main bilirubin-induced pathological mechanism ongoing CNS damage (inflammation, redox imbalance, and glutamate neurotoxicity). If confirmed by independent studies, the result suggests the potential of curcumin as an alternative/complementary approach to bilirubin-induced brain damage in the clinical scenario. 相似文献
Superplastic forming (SPF) combined with diffusion bonding (DB) has been used successfully for the fabrication of titanium
aerospace hardware. Many of these applications have been for military aircraft, whereby a complex built-up structure has been
replaced with monolithic parts. Several methods for applying the two- and four-sheet titanium SPF/DB processes have been devised,
including the welding of sheets prior to forming and the use of silk-screened stop-off (yttria) to prevent bonding where it
is undesirable. Very little progress has been made in the past few years toward understanding and modeling the SPF/DB process
using constitutive equations and data by laboratory testing. Concerns that engineers face in designing for fatigue life, acceptable
design loads, and damage tolerance are currently being studied, but the database is very limited. This is a summary of past
work found in the literature and forms the foundation for additional research.
This paper was presented at the International Symposium on Superplasticity and Superplastic Forming sponsored by the Manufacturing
Critical Sector at the ASM International AeroMat 2004 Conference and Exposition, June 8–9, 2004, in Seattle, WA. The symposium
was organized by Daniel G. Sanders, The Boeing Company. 相似文献
Language Identification has gained significant importance in recent years, both in research and commercial market place, demanding an improvement in the ability of machines to distinguish between languages. Although methods like Gaussian mixture models, hidden Markov models and neural networks are used for identifying languages the problem of language identification in noisy environments could not be addressed so far. This paper addresses the performance of automatic language identification system in noisy environments. A comparative performance analysis of speech enhancement techniques like minimum mean squared estimation, spectral subtraction and temporal processing, with different types of noise at different SNRs, is presented here. Though these individual enhancement techniques may not yield good performance with different types of noise at different SNRs, it is proposed to combine the evidences of all these techniques to improve the overall performance of the system significantly. The language identification studies are performed using IITKGP-MLILSC (IIT Kharagpur-Multilingual Indian Language Speech Corpus) databases which consists of 27 languages. 相似文献
A huge torrent of data traffic is generated from various heterogeneous applications and services at the Internet backbone. In general, at the backbone, all such applications and services are allocated spectral resources under a shared spectrum environment within elastic optical networks (EONs). In such a fully shared environment, connection requests (CRs) belonging to different traffic profiles compete for spectral resources. Hence, it is very challenging for network operators to resolve resource conflict that occur at the time of provisioning resources to such CRs. The heterogeneous traffic profile (HTP) considered in this work includes permanent lightpath demands (PLDs) and scheduled lightpath demands (SLDs). We propose various distance adaptive routing and spectrum assignment (DA-RSA) heuristics to resolve resource conflict among these two traffic profiles in EONs under a full sharing environment. Conventionally, preemption was the only technique to resolve such resource conflict among HTPs. Since preemption involves the overhead of selecting CRs to be preempted and then deallocating the resources given to those CRs, excessive preemption adversely affects the performance of the network. Therefore, in this work, we utilized bandwidth splitting as a solution to resolve resource conflict among HTPs under such a shared environment in EONs. Moreover, an integrated solution consisting of splitting and preemption is also proposed. We refer to this new integration as flow-based preemption. Our simulation results demonstrate that bandwidth splitting-based heuristics yield significant improvement in terms of the amount of bandwidth accepted in the network, link and node utilization ratio, number of transponders utilized and the amount of bandwidth dropped due to preemption. Moreover, the flow-based preemption approach is proved to be superior in performance amongst all proposed strategies.
The precise delivery of biofunctionalized matters is of great interest from the fundamental and applied viewpoints. In spite of significant progress achieved during the last decade, a parallel and automated isolation and manipulation of rare analyte, and their simultaneous on‐chip separation and trapping, still remain challenging. Here, a universal micromagnet junction for self‐navigating gates of microrobotic particles to deliver the biomolecules to specific sites using a remote magnetic field is described. In the proposed concept, the nonmagnetic gap between the lithographically defined donor and acceptor micromagnets creates a crucial energy barrier to restrict particle gating. It is shown that by carefully designing the geometry of the junctions, it becomes possible to deliver multiple protein‐functionalized carriers in high resolution, as well as MCF‐7 and THP‐1 cells from the mixture, with high fidelity and trap them in individual apartments. Integration of such junctions with magnetophoretic circuitry elements could lead to novel platforms without retrieving for the synchronous digital manipulation of particles/biomolecules in microfluidic multiplex arrays for next‐generation biochips. 相似文献
The inoculum to substrate (I/S) ratio is an important factor which influences the anaerobic digestion process. In this study, the effect of different I/S ratios on the performance of co-digestion of fleshings along with mixture of sludge generated during treatment of tannery
wastewater was investigated. The parameters studied were biogas generation, volatile solids reduction, volatile fatty acid
(VFA) production, and the stability of the digestion process based on VFA to alkalinity ratio was evaluated for various I/S ratios. Economical significance of I/S ratio as related to the volume of the anaerobic digester and the potential benefit of bio-energy generated are discussed
in detail. 相似文献
Studies were carried out by the application of ozonation and ultrasonication as pretreatment processes on primary and secondary
sludge generated during treatment of tannery wastewater to enhance the soluble chemical oxygen demand (SCOD). Further, co-digestion
(simultaneous digestion of two or more substrates) studies were carried out in batch reactors using the fleshings (a solid
waste generated during the processing of raw hides or skins into finished leather) along with the primary and the secondary
sludge wherein biogas generation was compared with and without pre-treated sludge using ozone and ultrasonication processes,
respectively. It was found that, application of pretreatment processes enhanced biogas generation by 45% in the case of ozone
pre-treated sludge and 53% by ultrasonication processes, respectively, in conjunction with the fleshings. However, considering
the optimum contact time required, application of ultrasonication as a pretreatment process was found to be the most appropriate
and viable process to enhance the SCOD. This pretreatment process has the potential for implementation in tanneries using
the shortest possible ultrasonication time to minimize energy cost when compared with ozonation time. 相似文献