Insulin’s effects on glucose homeostasis have been studied as extensively as any area of metabolic regulation. It is therefore particularly exciting when new technologies allow a fresh look at older, well-studied but unresolved issues. This excitement is heightened when information from new approaches challenges accepted paradigms. Recent studies have proved that tissue-specific knockout mice p...

Traditional flavor analysis relies on gas chromatography coupled to mass spectrometry (GC-MS) methods. Here we describe an indirect method coupling volatile compound formation to an ARO9-promoter-LacZ reporter gene. The resulting β-galactosidase activity correlated well with headspace solid phase micro extraction (HS/SPME) GC-MS data, particularly with respect to the formation of rose flavor. T...

Lost-foam (also known as Expendable Pattern Casting, EPC) is an ever-growing metal casting technique, capable of producing complex metal components without parting lines. Mold preparation for lost-foam casting is typically accurate, but expensive and slow. The goal of this research was to develop a new approach for producing rapid lost-foam molds. With this new approach, patterns generated by S...

Coordination and harmony between different departments of a company can be an important factor in achieving competitive advantage if the company corrects alignment between strategies of different departments. This paper presents an integrated decision model based on recent advances of geometric programming technique. The demand of a product considers as a power function of factors such as produ...

This paper investigates the direct and indirect impacts of ethanol production on land use, deforestation and food production. A partial equilibrium model of a national economy with two sectors and two regions, one of which includes a residual forest, is developed. It analyses how an exogenous increase in the ethanol price a ects input allocation (land and labor) between sectors (energy crop and...

Potential environmental benefits have been identified for the utilization of carbon dioxide (CO2) as a feedstock for polyurethanes (PUR). CO2 can be utilized in the PUR supply chain in a wide variety of ways ranging from direct CO2 utilization for polyols as a PUR precursor, to indirect CO2 utilization for basic chemicals in the PUR supply chain. In this paper, we present a systematic explorati...

In this paper, a comparison is made between direct and indirect perturbation approaches to solve the non-linear vibration equations of a piezoelectrically actuated cantilever microbeam. In this comparison, the equation of motion is considered according to Euler-Bernoulli theory with considering the non-linear geometric and inertia terms resulted from shortening effect. In the direct perturbatio...

Plasticity of excitatory synapses onto striatal projection neurons (MSNs) has the potential to regulate motor function by setting the gain on signals driving both direct- and indirect-pathway basal ganglia circuits. Endocannabinoid-dependent long-term depression (eCB-LTD) is the best characterized form of striatal plasticity, but the mechanisms governing its normal regulation and pathological d...