The thermodynamic free energy F is calculated for a gas whose particles are the quantum excitations of a piecewise uniform bosonic string. The string consists of two parts of length LI and LII , endowed with different tensions and mass densities, adjusted in such a way E-mail address: [email protected] E-mail address: [email protected] that the velocity of sound always equals the velocity of...

Most functional plasticity studies in the cortex have focused on layers (L) II/III and IV, whereas relatively little is known of LV. Structural measurements of dendritic spines in vivo suggest some specialization among LV cell subtypes. We therefore studied experience-dependent plasticity in the barrel cortex using intracellular recordings to distinguish regular spiking (RS) and intrinsic burst...

The X-ray absorption cross section ahove the L edges in Xenon gas has been measured using synchrotron radiation. Multielectron excitation effects are investigated over a few hundred eV region from the Xe-LI, LII. and LIII edges and thc contrihutions from the effects of shakenp and shakeoff to the photoahsorption spectrum are elucidated. Several features for the multielectron excitations were de...

BACKGROUND The European Commission requires tobacco products sold in the European Union to display standardized text health warnings. This article examines the effectiveness of the text health warnings among daily cigarette smokers in four Member States. METHODS Data were drawn from nationally representative samples of smokers from the International Tobacco Control Policy Evaluation Project s...

Large-scale assessments of reading comprehension, notably OECD’s Programme for International Student Achievement (PISA) and IEA’s Progress in Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS), generally use paper-and-pencil tests in which a reading passage, with different questions based on it, is presented to the student. The PISA mathematics and science literacy tests also consist of a hierarchically embedded s...

The entorhinal cortex (EC) plays a pivotal role in processing and conveying spatial information to the hippocampus. It has long been known that EC neurons are modulated by cholinergic input from the medial septum. However, little is known as to how synaptic release of acetylcholine affects the different cell types in EC. Here we combined optogenetics and patch-clamp recordings to study the effe...

Castor oil-based polyurethane as a renewable resource polymer has been synthesized for application as a host in polymer electrolyte for electrochemical devices. The polyurethane was added with LiI and NaI in different wt% to form a film of polymer electrolytes. The films were characterized by using attenuated total reflectance-Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy, dynamic mechanical analysis...

How salts affect water structure is an important topic in many research fields. Salt-water clusters can be used as model systems to extract interaction information that is difficult to obtain directly from bulk solutions. In the present study, integrated tempering sampling molecular dynamics (MD) are combined with quantum mechanics (QM) calculations to overcome the sampling problem in cluster s...

Aim. In periodontology lasers have been suggested for the photodynamic therapy (PDT): such therapy can be defined as the inactivation of cells, microorganisms, or molecules induced by light and not by heat. The aim of this study was to evaluate results of PDT using a 980 nm diode laser (Wiser Doctor Smile, Lambda SPA, Italy) combined with hydrogen peroxide, comparing a pulsed diode laser (LI) a...

OBJECTIVE To compare the results of 6-month follow-ups for hospitalized patients who were divided into two groups of low- and high-intensity treatments for smoking cessation and compared to the results of standard hospital treatment. METHODS A total of 2414 patients were screened. Two hundred thirty-seven current smokers were randomly assigned to high-intensity intervention (HII; 30-min motiv...