A general theory on media with randomly distributed inclusions .1. The average field behaviors

In this paper, a theory is developed to calculate the average strain field in the materials with randomly distributed inclusions. Many previous researches investigating the average field behaviors were based upon Mori and Tanaka's idea. Since they were restricted to studying those materials with uniform distributions of inclusions they did not need detailed statistical information of random microstructures, and could use the volume average to replace the ensemble average. To study more general materials with randomly distributed inclusions, the number density function is introduced in formulating the average field equation in this research. Both uniform and nonuniform distributions of inclusions are taken into account in detail.

Dynamics of pneumococcal nasopharyngeal carriage in healthy children attending a day care center in northern Spain. Influence of detection techniques on the results

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Comparative Observation of DC Arc Plasma Jets and Their Arc Root Behaviors at Reduced Pressure

Experimentally observed, results are presented for the DCarcplasmajets and theirarc-rootbehaviors generated atreduced gas pressure and without or with an' applied magnetic field. Pure argon, argon -hydrogen or argon-nitrogen mixture is used as the plasma-forming gas. A specially designed copper mirror is constructed and used for better observing the arc-root behavior on the anode surface of the DC non-transferred arcplasma torch. It is shown that for the cases without applied magnetic field, the laminar plasmajets are stable and approximately axisymmetrical. The arc-root attachment on the anode surface is completely diffusive when argon is used as the plasma-forming gas, while the arc-root attachment often becomes constrictive when hydrogen or nitrogen is added into the argon. When an external magnetic field is applied, the arcroot tends to rotate along the anode surface of the non-transferred arcplasma torch.

Analysis of Behaviors of Shock Focusing in the Inner Cavities of Double Wedge and Cone

The mechanisms of shock focusing in inner cavities of double wedge and cone are compared with that of traditional curved-surface shock focusing. The results show that there are many high temperature regions just behind shock surface which appear in two place alternately, one is near the surface of wall and the other is near the centerline. Also, changes in temperature, pressure, energy and power of the high temperature regions were analyzed and the results show that energy and power per unit volume increase, but total energy and power in the high temperature regions decrease during the process of shock moving forward the apex of double wedge or cone.

Randomised, crossover clinical trial, in healthy volunteers, to compare the systemic availability of two topical intranasal budesonide formulations

Background: Budesonide has a long history as intranasal drug, with many marketed products. Efforts should be made to demonstrate the therapeutic equivalence and safety comparability between them. Given that systemic availability significantly varies from formulations, the clinical comparability of diverse products comes to be of clinical interest and a regulatory requirement. The aim of the present study was to compare the systemic availability, pharmacodynamic effect, and safety of two intranasal budesonide formulations for the treatment of rhinitis. Methods: Eighteen healthy volunteers participated in this randomised, controlled, crossover, clinical trial. On two separated days, subjects received a single dose of 512 mu g budesonide (4 puffs per nostril) from each of the assayed devices (Budesonida nasal 64 (R), Aldo-Union, Spain and Rhinocort 64 (R), AstraZeneca, Spain). Budesonide availability was determined by the measurement of budesonide plasma concentration. The pharmacodynamic effect on the hypothalamic-adrenal axis was evaluated as both plasma and urine cortisol levels. Adverse events were tabulated and described. Budesonide availability between formulations was compared by the calculation of 90% CI intervals of the ratios of the main pharmacokinetic parameters describing budesonide bioavailability. Plasma cortisol concentration-time curves were compared by means of a GLM for Repeated Measures. Urine cortisol excretion between formulations was compared through the Wilcoxon's test. Results: All the enroled volunteers successfully completed the study. Pharmacokinetic parameters were comparable in terms of AUC(t) (2.6 +/- 1.5 vs 2.2 +/- 0.7), AUCi (2.9 +/- 1.5 vs 2.4 +/- 0.7), t(max) (0.4 +/- 0.1 vs 0.4 +/- 0.2), C(max)/AUC(i) (0.3 +/- 0.1 vs 0.3 +/- 0.0), and MRT (5.0 +/- 1.4 vs 4.5 +/- 0.6), but not in the case of C(max) (0.9 +/- 0.3 vs 0.7 +/- 0.2) and t(1/2) (3.7 +/- 1.8 vs 2.9 +/- 0.4). The pharmacodynamic effects, measured as the effect over plasma and urine cortisol, were also comparables between both formulations. No severe adverse events were reported and tolerance was comparable between formulations. Conclusion: The systemic availability of intranasal budesonide was comparable for both formulations in terms of most pharmacokinetic parameters. The pharmacodynamic effect on hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis was also similar. Side effects were scarce and equivalent between the two products. This methodology to compare different budesonide-containing devices is reliable and easy to perform, and should be recommended for similar products intented to be marketed or already on the market.

Self-instability and bending behaviors of nano plates

This paper aims at investigating the size-dependent self-buckling and bending behaviors of nano plates through incorporating surface elasticity into the elasticity with residual stress fields. In the absence of external loading, positive surface tension induces a compressive residual stress field in the bulk of the nano plate and there may be self-equilibrium states corresponding to the plate self-buckling. The self-instability of nano plates is investigated and the critical self-instability size of simply supported rectangular nano plates is determined. In addition, the residual stress field in the bulk of the nano plate is usually neglected in the existing literatures, where the elastic response of the bulk is often described by the classical Hooke’s law. The present paper considered the effect of the residual stress in the bulk induced by surface tension and adopted the elasticity with residual stress fields to study the bending behaviors of nano plates without buckling. The present results show that the surface effects only modify the coefficients in corresponding equations of the classical Kirchhoff plate theory.

Macaque lateral intraparietal area and oculomotor behaviors

Neurons in the primate lateral intraparietal area (area LIP) carry visual, saccade-related and eye position activities. The visual and saccade activities are anchored in a retinotopic framework and the overall response magnitude is modulated by eye position. It was proposed that the modulation by eye position might be the basis of a distributed coding of target locations in a head-centered space. Other recording studies demonstrated that area LIP is involved in oculomotor planning. These results overall suggest that area LIP transforms sensory information for motor functions. In this thesis I further explore the role of area LIP in processing saccadic eye movements by observing the effects of reversible inactivation of this area. Macaque monkeys were trained to do visually guided and memory saccades and a double saccade task to examine the use of eye position signal. Finally, by intermixing visual saccades with trials in which two targets were presented at opposite sides of the fixation point, I examined the behavior of visual extinction.

In chapter 2, I will show that lesion of area LIP results in increased latency of contralesional visual and memory saccades. Contralesional memory saccades are also hypometric and slower in velocity. Moreover, the impairment of memory saccades does not vary with the duration of the delay period. This suggests that the oculomotor deficits observed after inactivation of area LIP is not due to the disruption of spatial memory.

In chapter 3, I will show that lesion of area LIP does not severely affect the processing of spontaneous eye movement. However, the monkeys made fewer contralesional saccades and tended to confine their gaze to the ipsilesional field after inactivation of area LIP. On the other hand, lesion of area LIP results in extinction of the contralesional stimulus. When the initial fixation position was varied so that the retinal and spatial locations of the targets could be dissociated, it was found that the extinction behavior could best be described in a head-centered coordinate.

In chapter 4, I will show that inactivation of area LIP disrupts the use of eye position signal to compute the second movement correctly in the double saccade task. If the first saccade steps into the contralesional field, the error rate and latency of the second saccade are both increased. Furthermore, the direction of the first eye movement largely does not have any effect on the impairment of the second saccade. I will argue that this study provides important evidence that the extraretinal signal used for saccadic localization is eye position rather than a displacement vector.

In chapter 5, I will demonstrate that in parietal monkeys the eye drifts toward the lesion side at the end of the memory saccade in darkness. This result suggests that the eye position activity in the posterior parietal cortex is active in nature and subserves gaze holding.

Overall, these results further support the view that area LIP neurons encode spatial locations in a craniotopic framework and is involved in processing voluntary eye movements.

Absolute left-handed behaviors in a triangular elliptical-rod photonic crystal

In this paper we theoretically study the left-handed behaviors in a two-dimensional triangular photonic crystal made of elliptical rods in air. An absolute left-handed region is found in the second photonic band by using the plane wave expansion method to analyze the photonic band structure and equifrequency contours. Typical left-handed behaviors such as negative refraction, flat superlensing and plano-concave lensing are demonstrated by the finite-difference time-domain simulations. These behaviors are also compared with the quasi-negative refraction and the resulted focusing effects in a square-lattice two-dimensional photonic crystal. (c) 2005 Optical Society of America

Spatiotemporal behaviors and singularity of ultrashort pulsed Elegant Hermite-Gaussian beams

Analytical propagation expressions of ultrashort pulsed Elegant Hermite-Gaussian beams are derived and spatiotemporal properties of the pulses with different transverse modes are studied. Singularity of the complex amplitude envelope solution of the pulses obtained under slowly varying envelope approximation is analyzed in detail. The rigorous analytical solution of the pulse is deduced and no singularity emerges in the solution. The obtained results indicate that the transverse mode affects not only the spatiotemporal properties but also the singularity of the pulses. Time delay of the off-axis maximum intensity is more obvious and the singularity is located nearer to the z-axis for the pulse with higher transverse modes. (C) 2007 Elsevier GmbH. All rights reserved.

Physiological modules for generating discrete and rhythmic movements: action identification by a dynamic recurrent neural network

In this study we employed a dynamic recurrent neural network (DRNN) in a novel fashion to reveal characteristics of control modules underlying the generation of muscle activations when drawing figures with the outstretched arm. We asked healthy human subjects to perform four different figure-eight movements in each of two workspaces (frontal plane and sagittal plane). We then trained a DRNN to predict the movement of the wrist from information in the EMG signals from seven different muscles. We trained different instances of the same network on a single movement direction, on all four movement directions in a single movement plane, or on all eight possible movement patterns and looked at the ability of the DRNN to generalize and predict movements for trials that were not included in the training set. Within a single movement plane, a DRNN trained on one movement direction was not able to predict movements of the hand for trials in the other three directions, but a DRNN trained simultaneously on all four movement directions could generalize across movement directions within the same plane. Similarly, the DRNN was able to reproduce the kinematics of the hand for both movement planes, but only if it was trained on examples performed in each one. As we will discuss, these results indicate that there are important dynamical constraints on the mapping of EMG to hand movement that depend on both the time sequence of the movement and on the anatomical constraints of the musculoskeletal system. In a second step, we injected EMG signals constructed from different synergies derived by the PCA in order to identify the mechanical significance of each of these components. From these results, one can surmise that discrete-rhythmic movements may be constructed from three different fundamental modules, one regulating the co-activation of all muscles over the time span of the movement and two others elliciting patterns of reciprocal activation operating in orthogonal directions.

Never-resting microglia: physiological roles in the healthy brain and pathological implications

Microglia are largely known as the major orchestrators of the brain inflammatory response. As such, they have been traditionally studied in various contexts of disease, where their activation has been assumed to induce a wide range of detrimental effects. In the last few years, a series of discoveries have challenged the current view of microglia, showing their active and positive contribution to normal brain function. This Research Topic will review the novel physiological roles of microglia in the developing, mature and aging brain, under non-pathological conditions. In particular, this Research Topic will discuss the cellular and molecular mechanisms by which microglia contribute to the formation, pruning and plasticity of synapses; the maintenance of the blood brain barrier; the regulation of adult neurogenesis and hippocampal learning; and neuronal survival, among other important roles. Because these novel findings defy our understanding of microglial function in health as much as in disease, this Research Topic will also summarize the current view of microglial nomenclature, phenotypes, origin and differentiation, sex differences, and contribution to various brain pathologies. Additionally, novel imaging approaches and molecular tools to study microglia in their non-activated state will be discussed. In conclusion, this Research Topic seeks to emphasize how the current research in neuroscience is challenged by never-resting microglia.

Epitope mapping of antibodies to alpha-synuclein in LRRK2 mutation carriers, idiopathic Parkinson disease patients, and healthy controls

Alpha-synuclein (Snca) plays a major role in Parkinson disease (PD). Circulating anti-Snca antibodies has been described in PD patients and healthy controls, but they have been poorly characterized. This study was designed to assess the prevalence of anti-Snca reactivity in human subjects carrying the LRRK2 mutation, idiopathic PD (iPD) patients, and healthy controls and to map the epitopes of the anti-Snca antibodies. Antibodies to Snca were detected by ELISA and immunoblotting using purified recombinant Snca in plasma from individuals carrying LRRK2 mutations (104), iPD patients (59), and healthy controls (83). Epitopes of antibodies were mapped using recombinant protein constructs comprising different regions of Snca. Clear positive anti-Snca reactivity showed no correlation with age, sex, years of evolution, or the disability scores for PD patients and anti-Snca reactivity was not prevalent in human patients with other neurological or autoimmune diseases. Thirteen of the positive individuals were carriers of LRRK2 mutations either non-manifesting (8 out 49 screened) or manifesting (5 positive out 55), three positive (out of 59) were iPD patients, and five positive (out of 83) were healthy controls. Epitope mapping showed that antibodies against the N-terminal (a.a. 1-60) or C-terminal (a.a. 109-140) regions of Snca predominate in LRRK2 mutation carriers and iPD patients, being N122 a critical amino acid for recognition by the anti-C-terminal directed antibodies. Anti-Snca circulating antibodies seem to cluster within families carrying the LRRK2 mutation indicating possible genetic or common environmental factors in the generation of anti-Snca antibodies. These results suggest that case-controls' studies are insufficient and further studies in family cohorts of patients and healthy controls should be undertaken, to progress in the understanding of the possible relationship of anti-Snca antibodies and PD patholog

Investigations on valence-change behaviors of europium ions in Eu-doped aluminate and silicate phosphors

Compounds of Sr3Al2O6: Eu, Sr4Al14O25: Eu, and BaZnSiO4: Eu were synthesized by high-temperature solid state reactions. The doping Eu3+ ions were partially reduced to Eu2+ in Sr4Al14O25: Eu and BaZnSiO4: Eu prepared in an oxidizing atmosphere, N-2 + O-2. However, such an abnormal reduction process could not be performed in Sr3Al2O6: Eu, which was also prepared in an atmosphere of N-2 + O-2. Moreover, even though Sr3Al2O6: Eu was synthesized in a reducing condition CO, only part of the Eu3+ ions was reduced to Eu2+. The existence of trivalent and divalent europium ions was confirmed by photoluminescent spectra. The different valence-change behaviors of europium ions in the hosts were attributed to the difference in host crystal structures. The higher the crystal structure stiffness, the easier the reduction process from Eu3+ to Eu2+.

Spectroscopic and fluorescence decay behaviors of Yb3+ -doped SiO2-PbO-Na2O-K2O glass

The spectroscopic and fluorescent decay behaviors of Yb3+-doped SiO2-PbO-Na2O-K2O glass is reported in this work. Yb2O3 contents of 1, 1.5 and 2mol% are added into the glass. Through the measurement of absorption and fluorescence spectra, and fluorescent decay rate at room temperature and at low temperature (18 K), it is found that the nonradiative decay rate of Yb3+ ions is mainly determined by the interaction between residual hydroxyl groups and Yb3+ ions. Concentration quenching effect can be omitted in this glass up to the Yb3+ ion concentration of 8.98 x 10(20)/cm(3). Multiphonon decay rate is also very small because of the large energy gap between F-2(5/2) and F-2(7/2) levels of Yb3+ ions. (c) 2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Saúde sexual de mulheres com estomia na perspectiva da teoria de Nola Pender

O objeto deste estudo são as repercussões do estoma intestinal por Câncer na promoção da saúde sexual de mulheres. A investigação sobre a promoção da saúde sexual da mulher com estoma torna-se instigante frente à condição imposta pela cirurgia, em interface com os constructos sócio-histórico-culturais relacionados aos papéis sociais, os quais podem influenciar na forma como as mulheres promovem sua saúde sexual. Esta pesquisa teve por objetivos: conhecer os aspectos biológicos, psicológicos e socioculturais anteriores e posteriores à confecção do estoma intestinal definitivo em mulheres; analisar as repercussões do estoma na promoção da saúde sexual de mulheres; e propor estratégias de cuidar de enfermagem às mulheres com estoma para autopromoção da saúde sexual, considerando a Teoria de Promoção da Saúde de Nola Pender. Trata-se de uma pesquisa com abordagem qualitativa, tendo como sujeitos 14 mulheres com estomia intestinal definitiva, após terem sido acometidas por Câncer. O referencial teórico-metodológico utilizado foi a Promoção da Saúde de Nola Pender, o qual, a partir da identificação dos fatores biopsicossociais e comportamentais, busca incentivar atitudes saudáveis, visando ao bem-estar como proposta de promoção da saúde. O cenário foi o Centro Municipal de Reabilitação Oscar Clark, localizado no município do Rio de Janeiro. Para a produção dos dados foi realizada a técnica de entrevista semiestruturada, utilizando um roteiro pré-elaborado, com base no diagrama de Nola Pender. A análise de conteúdo dos discursos obtidos permitiu criar três categorias: a) perfil sociocultural, psicobiológico e comportamental de mulheres com estoma: uma caracterização antes e após a cirurgia; b) conhecimentos, influências e sentimentos da mulher com estoma sobre a promoção da saúde sexual após a cirurgia; c) resultado do comportamento para promoção da saúde sexual após o estoma: um processo em construção. Os fatores determinantes do comportamento para a promoção da saúde sexual envolveram as condições biológicas, especialmente em decorrência dos efeitos colaterais da radioterapia, além de um processo complexo permeado por fatores sociais, incluindo o estigma, as desigualdades de gênero, as relações de poder, dentre outros valores que norteiam o comportamento humano. As mudanças experienciadas requereram das mulheres o desenvolvimento de estratégias de enfrentamento à nova situação, com a necessidade de adaptações comportamentais para a vivência e promoção da saúde sexual. Tais adaptações refletiram em um aprendizado pontual, da ordem do vivido, o qual perpassou pela falta de orientação em saúde e pelas questões socioculturais. Com isso, a vivência da sexualidade foi considerada a principal barreira para a promoção da saúde sexual. Já os comportamentos direcionados à prevenção de agravos à saúde sexual foram percebidos como as ações que mais proporcionam benefícios. Neste cenário, a consulta de enfermagem apresenta-se como um instrumento relevante na assistência clínica-educativa. Este estudo contribui para um aprofundamento do conhecimento acerca da promoção da saúde sexual de mulheres com estoma e sinaliza propostas para a atuação do enfermeiro na assistência a essas pessoas.