The hypothalamic paraventricular nucleus (PVN) is the primary driver of hypothalamo-pituitary-adrenocortical (HPA) responses. At least part of the role of the PVN is managing the demands of chronic stress exposure. With repeated exposure to stress, hypophysiotrophic corticotropin-releasing hormone (CRH) neurons of the PVN display a remarkable cellular, synaptic, and connectional plasticity that...

Despite the valuable contributions on self-adaptation, most implemented approaches assume adaptation goals and monitoring infrastructures as non-mutable, thus constraining their applicability to systems whose context awareness is restricted to static monitors. Therefore, separation of concerns, dynamic monitoring, and runtime requirements variability are critical for satisfying system goals und...

We consider multiagent systems whose agents compete for resources using strategies with adaptable preferences. Diversity of initial preferences of strategies is introduced by randomly assigning virtual points to the strategies of each agent. When diversity increases, the successive appearance of scaling, kinetic sampling and waiting mechanisms shows that agent cooperation becomes increasingly i...

Prism adaptation (PA) has been demonstrated to be effective in improving hemispatial neglect. However not all patients seem to benefit from this procedure. Thus, the objective of the present work is to provide behavioural and neuroanatomical predictors of recovery by exploring the reorganization of low-order visuo-motor behaviour and high-order visuo-spatial representation induced by PA. To thi...

1.1.1 Two Conflicting Trends Two recent and conflicting trends in Internet applications motivate the discussion in this work: video traffic becoming dominant, and usage-based pricing becoming prevalent. Video traffic becoming dominant: Video consumption is on the rise. For example, Cisco predicts that 70% of all mobile traffic will be from video alone by 2016 [1]. Likewise, wireline traffic is ...

Recent sensory experience affects both perception and the response properties of visual neurons. Here I review a rapid form of experience-dependent plasticity that follows adaptation, the presentation of a particular stimulus or ensemble of stimuli for periods ranging from tens of milliseconds to minutes. Adaptation has a rich history in psychophysics, where it is often used as a tool for disse...

As opposed to animals, plants have to cope with the resources, environmental restrictions, herbivores, and pathogens they find in the particular spot where they are bound to grow. Hence, resource sequestration, predation and competition relationships, and adaptation to various sources of other environmental stresses and their seasonal variation must be flexible enough to ensure survival and suc...

Despite Darwin’s pluralistic view that “natural selection has been the main, but not the exclusive means of modification” (Darwin, 1872) (quoted in (Lewontin and Gould, 1979)), subsequent major developments in evolutionary biology such as the theories of natural selection, the modern synthesis, and molecular neo-darwinism have biased scientific explanations of evolution towards gene-centric the...

The metabolic syndrome (MetS) is associated with clustering of cardiovascular risk factors in individuals that may greatly increase their risk of developing coronary artery disease. Obesity and related metabolic dysfunction are the driving forces in the prevalence of MetS. It is believed that obesity has detrimental effects on cardiovascular function, but its overall impact on the vasomotor reg...

Green, Dowling, Siegel and Ripps (1975) J. gen. Physiol. 65, 483-502 found that both receptors and post-receptoral elements regulate the process of light adaptation in skate retina. As a test of the generality of this conclusion, we repeated their experiments on the retina of the intact albino rat. Increment threshold and intensity-response functions of aspartate-isolated receptor potentials, E...