Amiloride inhalation therapy in mucoviscidosis

The defective regulation of the secretory chloride channel and the accelerated rate of sodium absorption in the airway epithelia of patients with cystic fibrosis (CF) contribute to the dehydration of airway secretions which is responsible for secondary damage in the respiratory tract. The sodium-blocker amiloride inhibits sodium absorption depending on the dosage of the drug. This effect is documented by means of measuring transepithelial potential difference which is decreased following to inhalative amiloride administration in CF patients. Clinical long term efficiency has been shown to be probable, but has to be confirmed. Investigation in this field is difficult, because there are some other important factors which influence viscosity of mucus. The use of amiloride can best be evaluated, if it is given immediately after birth. However, the answer to some important questions has to be found before.     

Discrete Chemical Release From a Microfluidic Chip

We demonstrate a discrete chemical release method, capable of delivering picoliter volumes of chemical solutions with 100 mum of spatial resolution and 20 mus of response time. The releasing mechanism is based on the transfer of pulsed liquid plugs through a hydrophobic air chamber. A microfluidic chip consisting of such a releasing array (2 times 10) is designed and fabricated. Numerical simulation and experimental testing are performed to verify the working principle. Advantages of this release-on-demand technology include leakage-free, fast response and versatile control of release profile. This new method could be a key enabling technology for precisely controlled release of biochemicals for modern pharmacological and biological research.     

Rapid solidification in the Al2O3ZrO2 system

Eutectic compositions of Al₂O₃ and ZrO₂ have been melted and rapidly solidified by shock-wave quenching, flame-pressure atomization and high-pressure water atomization. Quenching rates > 10⁴ K/s resulted in amorphous particles which, on annealing, crystallized at 1310°C. Microcrystalline particles with tetragonal ZrO₂ distributed in an ?-Al₂O₃ matrix formed at lower quenching rates. ?-Al₂O₃ transformed into α-Al₂O₃ on annealing at 953°C.     

Support vector classification of proteomic profile spectra based on feature extraction with the bi-orthogonal discrete wavelet transform

Automatic classification of high-resolution mass spectrometry data has increasing potential to support physicians in diagnosis of diseases like cancer. The proteomic data exhibit variations among different disease states. A precise and reliable classification of mass spectra is essential for a successful diagnosis and treatment. The underlying process to obtain such reliable classification results is a crucial point. In this paper such a method is explained and a corresponding semi automatic parameterization procedure is derived. Thereby a simple straightforward classification procedure to assign mass spectra to a particular disease state is derived. The method is based on an initial preprocessing stage of the whole set of spectra followed by the bi-orthogonal discrete wavelet transform (DWT) for feature extraction. The approximation coefficients calculated from the scaling function exhibit a high peak pattern matching property and feature a denoising of the spectrum. The discriminating coefficients, selected by the Kolmogorov–Smirnov test are finally used as features for training and testing a support vector machine with both a linear and a radial basis kernel. For comparison the peak areas obtained with the it ClinProt-System ¹ [33] were analyzed using the same support vector machines. The introduced approach was evaluated on clinical MALDI-MS data sets with two classes each originating from cancer studies. The cross validated error rates using the wavelet coefficients where better than those obtained from the peak areas².     

Building the IBM 4758 secure coprocessor

Meeting the challenge of building a user-configurable secure coprocessor provided several lessons in hardware and software development and continues to spur further research. In developing the 4758, we met our major research security goals and provided the following features: (1) a lifetime-secure tamper-responding device, rather than one that is secure only between resets that deployment-specific security officers perform; (2) a secure booting process in which each layer progressively validates the next less-trusted layer, with hardware restricting access to its secrets before passing control to that layer; (3) an actual manufacturable product - a nontrivial accomplishment considering that we designed the device so that it does not have a personality until configured in the field; (4) the first FIPS 140-1 Level 4 validation, arguably the only general-purpose computational platform validated at this level so far; and (5) a multipurpose programmable device based on a 99-MHz 486 CPU internal environment, with a real operating system, a C language development environment and relatively high-speed cryptography     

The boundary finite element method for predicting directions of cracks emerging from notches at bimaterial junctions

The analysis of a bimaterial medium with various notch opening angles has been carried out using boundary finite element method (BFEM) under arbitrary loading conditions. Introduced as novel method for stress concentration problems at geometrical discontinuities, cracks, bimaterial notches etc., the BFEM has been proved as numerically highly efficient. This has become more and more important because wedge type construction creates stress concentrations which may lead to crack initiation in many practical situations where multi-layered composite material is used, e.g. within aerospace, ship or automobile structures. So, the computational prediction of potential directions for crack initiation is essential for the knowledge of weak regions. All the analysis results are based on the hypothesis of Erdogan and Sih and have been verified by the well established finite element method. Results for potential crack initiation angles of both homogeneous and bimaterial media are presented with multiple examples of different wedge angles and different loading combinations.     

Anatomy of a meeting.

Provides a detailed account of a joint meeting (November 4, 1967) of the Oregon Psychological Association and the Oregon District Branch of the American Psychiatric Association as a model for others who might attempt to bring such organizations into constructive interaction. Aspects of planning, committee meetings, organizational resources, registration, and programs are described. Feedback has been uniformly positive from both professional groups. There have already been gestures toward further cooperative action, such as the suggested establishment of collaborating committees on social issues or joint sponsorship of workshops. Underlying this constructive movement appears to be the large amount of positive interaction that took place among individuals at the meeting, the sense of mutual commitment created by the panels, and the erosion of some aspects of the negative organizational stereotypes. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

A Study on the Feasibility of Measuring the Emissivity with the Laser-Flash Method

The laser-flash method is a fast, widely used and well established technique to measure the thermal diffusivity. Since its introduction in the 1960s, it was proposed to expand this technique to the measurement of heat capacity and emissivity. Currently, the measurement of spectral emissivity at high temperatures is connected with relatively large uncertainties, although the spectral emissivity is an essential parameter for applications, e.g., in the lamp industry and fusion research. In this work, a theoretical study is presented on the possibility of emissivity measurements using the laser-flash method. Two mathematical approaches are discussed which solve the problem, that a measured temperature rise—necessary to calculate the emissivity—itself depends on the emissivity. It is shown that both methods have a negligible arithmetic error, making them applicable to be used in future work.