A rapid spectroscopic method to detect the fraudulent treatment of tuna fish with carbon monoxide

Carbon monoxide (CO) can be used to treat fresh meat and fish in order to retain its ‘fresh’ red colour appearance for a longer period of time. In fact, upon aging, myoglobin is oxidized to met-myoglobin with the concomitant blue-shift and broadening of the Soret maximum, which brings about a change in the colour of the fish, revealing that it is no longer fresh. The use of carbon monoxide, which reacts with the oxy-myoglobin to form a fairly stable cherry red carboxy-myoglobin complex may mask spoilage, because the CO-complex can be stable beyond the microbiological shelf life of the meat. The presence of CO in tuna fish has been investigated by optical spectroscopy as the formation of the CO adduct can be easily detected by the combined analysis of electronic absorption spectra in their normal and second derivative modes, monitoring the intense Soret band at 420 nm. The presence of met- and oxy-myoglobin can obscure the presence of small amounts of the CO adduct; however, it can be revealed by chemically reducing the met- and oxy-forms to the deoxy-form in an anaerobic environment. This spectroscopic method provides a qualitatively rapid laboratory screening procedure for food control to unmask the presence of CO in frozen or fresh fish.     

LHC and the dark matter search: A review

The restart of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, foreseen in November 2009 after the incident of 2008, will finally open a new window on the physics at the TeV scale and will allow the discovery of the Standard Model Higgs boson, if it exists, or of possible alternative schemes for the spontaneous symmetry-breaking mechanism. Moreover the LHC Collider will hopefully provide an answer to one of the most compelling questions of today coming from astronomical observations, astrophysics and cosmic ray experiments: which is the particle physics candidate for the Dark Matter component of the Universe? Supersymmetry (SUSY) is a theoretically attractive scenario for physics beyond the Standard Model which can provide a suitable Dark Matter candidate in case R-parity is conserved. If SUSY is manifesting at the TeV scale, as favored by several arguments, it will be accessible at the LHC Collider within the first few years of data taking. In this paper search strategies for a generic SUSY models with R-parity conservation with the ATLAS detector are described. These inclusive search strategies are based on signatures with missing transverse momentum from undetected neutralinos, in addition to multiple hard jets and leptons. The corresponding discovery reach for the first fb⁻¹ of integrated luminosity of ATLAS data will be presented together with a discussion of possible measurements needed to extract the masses of SUSY particles including the Lightest Supersymmetric Particle (LSP), which in various supersymmetric (SUSY) symmetry breaking scenarios, is the lightest neutralino .     

Study of resistive plate chambers for muon detection at hadron colliders

We present the performance of a hodoscope made of resistive plate chambers (RPC) installed in the RD5 experiment at CERN and exposed to beams of high energy muons and pions. The efficiency as a function of the particle flux is studied for different resistivities. A substantial improvement is obtained with plates of lower resistivity. Tracking muons through the RPC and using the bending power of a 2.7 Tm iron toroid, a simple trigger algorithm is used to select large momentum muons.     

Diabetes and Colorectal Cancer Risk: A New Look at Molecular Mechanisms and Potential Role of Novel Antidiabetic Agents

Epidemiological data have demonstrated a significant association between the presence of type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM) and the development of colorectal cancer (CRC). Chronic hyperglycemia, insulin resistance, oxidative stress, and inflammation, the processes inherent to T2DM, also play active roles in the onset and progression of CRC. Recently, small dense low-density lipoprotein (LDL) particles, a typical characteristic of diabetic dyslipidemia, emerged as another possible underlying link between T2DM and CRC. Growing evidence suggests that antidiabetic medications may have beneficial effects in CRC prevention. According to findings from a limited number of preclinical and clinical studies, glucagon-like peptide-1 receptor agonists (GLP-1RAs) could be a promising strategy in reducing the incidence of CRC in patients with diabetes. However, available findings are inconclusive, and further studies are required. In this review, novel evidence on molecular mechanisms linking T2DM with CRC development, progression, and survival will be discussed. In addition, the potential role of GLP-1RAs therapies in CRC prevention will also be evaluated.     

Effects of chronic ethacrynic acid exposure on glutathione conjugation and MRP expression in human colon tumor cells

This study describes the presence of nitric oxide synthase (NOS-ir) immunoreactive neurons in the thalamic ventrobasal complex of the cat. NOS-ir is co-localized with gamma-aminobutyric acid (GABA-ir) in a subset of small neurons identified as local circuit neurons in previous studies. The double labeled neurons are further identified by a larger soma diameter when compared to GABA-ir only neurons. All NOS-ir somata exhibit GABA-ir but none exhibit immunoreactivity to calbindin.     

New results on ATLAS RPC's aging at CERN's GIF

In order to ensure that the resistive plate chambers used in the ATLAS experiment will not show, during their operation, any abnormal aging effect which could degrade their performances, an aging test is being performed at X5-GIF, CERN's gamma irradiation facility. In this paper, the latest results are presented, together with an example of successful damage recovery technique.     

Biosignal pattern recognition and interpretation systems. 3.Methods of classification

The following topics are discussed: Bayes/minimum distance classifiers; maximum likelihood classification estimation; k-nearest neighbor classification; entropy criteria; syntactic techniques; string matching; the Cocke-Younger-Kasami parsing algorithm; syntactic learning; finite-state automata; neural network classification techniques; learning vector quantization; cluster swapping; hierarchial clustering procedures