Cyclic Nigerosyl-Nigerose as Oxygen Nanocarrier to Protect Cellular Models from Hypoxia/Reoxygenation Injury: Implications from an In Vitro Model

Heart failure (HF) prevalence is increasing among the aging population, and the mortality rate remains unacceptably high despite improvements in therapy. Myocardial ischemia (MI) and, consequently, ischemia/reperfusion injury (IRI), are frequently the basis of HF development. Therefore, cardioprotective strategies to limit IRI are mandatory. Nanocarriers have been proposed as alternative therapy for cardiovascular disease. Controlled reoxygenation may be a promising strategy. Novel nanocarriers, such as cyclic nigerosyl-nigerose (CNN), can be innovative tools for oxygen delivery in a controlled manner. In this study we analyzed new CNN-based formulations as oxygen nanocarriers (O₂-CNN), and compared them with nitrogen CNN (N₂-CNN). These different CNN-based formulations were tested using two cellular models, namely, cardiomyoblasts (H9c2), and endothelial (HMEC) cell lines, at different concentrations. The effects on the growth curve during normoxia (21% O₂, 5% CO₂ and 74% N₂) and their protective effects during hypoxia (1% O₂, 5% CO₂ and 94% N₂) and reoxygenation (21% O₂, 5% CO₂ and 74% N₂) were studied. Neither O₂-CNN nor N₂-CNN has any effect on the growth curve during normoxia. However, O₂-CNN applied before hypoxia induces a 15–30% reduction in cell mortality after hypoxia/re-oxygenation when compared to N₂-CNN. O₂-CNN showed a marked efficacy in controlled oxygenation, which suggests an interesting potential for the future medical application of soluble nanocarrier systems for MI treatment.     

Thermal behaviour of TiO2-encapsulating polymers

Comparing the thermal properties of TiO₂ encapsulating polystyrene and poly(methyl methacrylate) with those of TiO₂ dispersion polymers it was found that the encapsulating polymers have two thermal relaxation regions. The activation energy of those thermal relaxation regions was determined using the Wunderlich method and it was found that the values are similar to the activation energy for the dynamic dispersion. It is suggested that the low-temperature thermal relaxation is caused by the local change of conformation of molecular chains, while the high-temperature thermal relaxation is similar to that of the normal glass transition temperature including the interaction with TiO₂. In addition, the thermal behaviour near the degradation point in different atmospheres indicates that the encapsulating polymer has a specific structure for adsorbing a large amount of oxygen.     

Effect of the Chiral Center Position of an Optically Active Terminal Group on the Induction of Optical Activity in Polysilanes

Summary Polysilanes with an optically active alkoxy group, i.e., (S)-(+)-2-butoxy, (R)-(-)-2-butoxy, (S)-(-)-2-methyl-1-butoxy, and (S)-(+)-3,7-dimethyl-1-octoxy, at the terminal positions, the chiral carbon centers of which were located at the α, β, and γ positions relative to the oxygen, respectively, were prepared, and the effect of the position of chiral center of the terminal optically active group on the induction of optical activity in polysilanes was investigated. The circular dichroism (CD) spectra of these polymers showed positive Cotton signals around 340 nm at temperatures below -20 °C, but the intensities were small, indicating that the optically active groups at the terminal positions have some ability, albeit small, to induce optical activity to the polysilanes. Further, the optically active (S)-(+)-2-butoxy and (R)-(-)-2-butoxy groups did not control the helical sense direction of the polymers, despite the different chiral stimuli from the 2-butoxy groups introduced to the terminal positions. To control the helical structure of polysilanes by the use of optically active terminal groups, appropriate optically active groups are required.     

Accelerating sequential programs on commodity multi-core processors

A recently proposed pipelined multithreading (PMT) technique exhibits wide applicability in parallelizing general sequential programs on multi-core processors. However, significant inter-core communication overhead limits PMT performance and prevents its commercial utilization. A simple and effective clustered pipelined multithreading (CPMT) approach is presented to accelerate sequential programs on commodity multi-core processors. This CPMT technique adopts a clustered communication mechanism that can yield very low average communication overhead by eliminating false sharing as well as reducing communication operation and transit delays in the software-only approach. A single-producer/single-consumer concurrent lock-free clusteredQueue algorithm based on a two-level queue structure is also proposed. The accuracy of CPMT is theoretically demonstrated. The performances of the algorithm and CPMT are evaluated on a commodity AMD Phenom four-core processor. The number of enqueue and dequeue times of the algorithm are 20.8 and 23 cycles given an appropriate parameter, respectively. The speedup of CPMT ranges from 13.1% to 119.8% for typical loops extracted from the SPEC CPU 2000 benchmark suite.     

Radiation-induced polymerization of ethylene in pilot plant. III. Heavy-phase recycling process

Radiation-induced polymerization of ethylene using aqueous tert-butyl alcohol as medium was carried out in a large-scale pilot plant with a 50-liter central source-type reactor at a pressure of 105 to 395 kg/cm², temperature of 30° to 80°C, mean dose rate of 4.5 × 10⁴ to 1.9 × 10⁵ rads/hr, ethylene feed rate of 5.5 to 23.5 kg/hr, and medium feed rate of 21 to 102 l./hr. The space–time yield and molecular weight of the polymer were in the range of 4.7 to 16.8 g/l.-hr and 1.3 × 10⁴ to 8.9 × 10⁴, respectively. The space–time yield and molecular weight increased with mean residence time at 30°C, whereas at 80°C they became almost independent of the time. The space–time yield increased with pressure and dose rate, slightly decreased with temperature, and was maximum at ethylene molar fraction of 0.5. The polymer molecular weight increased with pressure and ethylene molar fraction, and decreased with dose rate and temperature. The total amount of deposited polymer on the reactor wall, source case wall, and scraping blades was usually less than 1 kg, which was negligibly small for the analysis of polymerization. Continuous discharge of the polymer slurry and production of fine-powder polyethylene were successfully carried out. In the central source-type reactor, a dose rate of 1.9 × 10⁵ rads/hr was obtained with a ⁶⁰Co source of ca. 12 kCi.     

A coaxial pulsed plasma thruster using chemical propellants

Pulsed plasma thrusters (PPTs) have the advantages of mechanical simplicity and robustness compared to other electric propulsion systems. However the thrust power ratio of PPTs is lower than that of other electric propulsion systems. To enhance the thrust performance of the PPT, we propose to use several combustible solid chemicals as coaxial PPT propellants to replace Teflon^® (Polytetrafluoroethylene: PTFE). With the design, the force obtained thermodynamically is expected to augment the PPT thrust power ratio with the help of the chemical energy contained in the propellants. As a result, the thrust power ratio is increased using hydroxyl-terminated polybutadiene-ammonium perchlorate (HTPB-AP)-based propellants compared to the case of ordinary Teflon. The discharge current and voltage waveform does not change even when the propellant is changed. These findings could indicate that the impulse bits by gasdynamic contribution are lager in the case of chemical solid propellants than in the case of Teflon.     

Terminal defined chain-growth polycondensation of 4-chloropyridine

This work examines the polycondensation of 4-chloropyridine derivatives using an N-(4-tert-butylbenzyl)-4-chloropyridinium (BPymCl) initiator and ion exchange reagents NaBPh₄, NaBF₄, and TBABF₄. The ¹H NMR spectra demonstrate that the product quantity is proportional to the total conversion of the monomer and the initiator. The MALDI-TOF MS spectrum shows that the product contains more than 9 monomer units. The polymerization was well-terminated via the addition of dimethylaminopyridine. These results indicate that the polycondensation proceeds in a chain-growth manner. This polycondensation could be a new example of a controlled polymerization with a well-defined end group.     

High-Performance Vector-Controlled AC Motor Drives: Applications and New Technologies

A high-performance ac motor control has been developed by employing the vector control concept. Its versatility has been proven through the six years of experience in applications to pinch roll drives of continuous casting plants, machine tool spindle drives, and other drive systems in industry. Equivalent torque characteristics are achieved with ac motors compared to dc motors without direct detection of the magnetic flux. The effect of rotor temperature on the torque characteristics has been compensated to a satisfactory level in actual industrial use by various means. Servo drives, both synchronous motor and induction motor types, have been introduced. The test results show that the performance of ac servo drives is equivalent or superior to that of the PWM-controlled dc servo drives. Furthermore, an example of the direct-drive servo is described, where an ultra-low speed high-torque motor and an ultra-high resolution position sensor play key roles. In addition, the possibility of a more sophisticated servo drive exploiting modern control theory is suggested.     

Speech recognition in living rooms: Integrated speech enhancement and recognition system based on spatial,spectral and temporal modeling of sounds

Research on noise robust speech recognition has mainly focused on dealing with relatively stationary noise that may differ from the noise conditions in most living environments. In this paper, we introduce a recognition system that can recognize speech in the presence of multiple rapidly time-varying noise sources as found in a typical family living room. To deal with such severe noise conditions, our recognition system exploits all available information about speech and noise; that is spatial (directional), spectral and temporal information. This is realized with a model-based speech enhancement pre-processor, which consists of two complementary elements, a multi-channel speech–noise separation method that exploits spatial and spectral information, followed by a single channel enhancement algorithm that uses the long-term temporal characteristics of speech obtained from clean speech examples. Moreover, to compensate for any mismatch that may remain between the enhanced speech and the acoustic model, our system employs an adaptation technique that combines conventional maximum likelihood linear regression with the dynamic adaptive compensation of the variance of the Gaussians of the acoustic model. Our proposed system approaches human performance levels by greatly improving the audible quality of speech and substantially improving the keyword recognition accuracy.     

PEG-PLA nanoparticles prepared by emulsion solvent diffusion using oil-soluble and water-soluble PEG-PLA

Poly(ethylene glycol)-block-polylactide (PEG-PLA) nanoparticles were prepared through the oil-in-water (O/W, ethyl acetate/water) emulsion technique using oil-soluble PEG-PLA in the presence of water-soluble PEG-PLA as a surfactant. The particle diameter decreased with increasing water-soluble PEG-PLA concentration, the smallest averaged diameter was 75 nm. From these results, it was found that water-soluble PEG-PLA acted as a surfactant which prevents further coalescence of droplets. In addition, the particles diameter decreased with increasing hydrophile-lipophile balance of oil-soluble PEG-PLA in the absence of water-soluble PEG-PLA. In contrast, the particle diameter was constant in the presence of water-soluble PEG-PLA. Therefore, the capability of water-soluble PEG-PLA as a surfactant was more excellent than that of oil-soluble PEG-PLA.