IMPORTANCE Abnormalities of axonal excitability characterized by upregulation of persistent sodium (Na+) conductances and reduced potassium (K+) currents have been reported in sporadic amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (SALS) phenotypes and linked to the development of clinical features such as fasciculations and neurodegeneration. OBJECTIVE To investigate whether abnormalities of axonal ion chan...

In the setting of persistent homology computation, a useful tool is the persistence barcode representation in which pairs of birth and death times of homology classes are encoded in the form of intervals. Starting from a polyhedral complex K (an object subdivided into cells which are polytopes) and an initial order of the set of vertices, we are concerned with the general problem of searching f...

Sleep disturbance is a very common finding in patients with persistent cough1. This is especially apparent in infants with common cold or influenza and the continuous crying can lead to considerable distress for the parents. Cough syrups which are easily available as over the counter medications can induce sleep, and many parents turn to this medication when their infant is suffering from persi...

C(CH3)5(+), a pentacoordinate carbocation, was recently described as a "fleeting" molecule, that is, stable only at low temperatures. Herein it is shown using theoretical methods that, owing to carbon tunneling, the molecule is not persistent even at 0 K. One possible way to lengthen its lifespan is by deuterium substitution, in spite of the fact that no bond to hydrogen is broken.

In spite of five decades of study, the biophysics of spreading depression (SD) is incompletely understood. Earlier we have modeled seizures and SD, and we have shown that currents through ion channels normally present in neuron membranes can generate SD-like depolarization. In the present study, we define the conditions for triggering SD and the parameters that influence its course in a model o...