Accumulation of extracellular matrix (ECM) in glomerular mesangium correlates with loss of renal function in diabetic nephropathy. However, the mechanisms underlying are still incompletely known. In the present study, we explored the role of caveolae in ECM production in rat mesangial cells (MCs) stimulated by high glucose or transforming growth factor-β1 (TGF-β1), and investigated the possible...

The issue of time-awareness presents a critical challenge for empiricism: if temporal properties are not directly perceived, how do we become aware of them? A unique empiricist account of time-awareness suggested by Hume’s comments on time in the Treatise avoids the problems characteristic of other empiricist accounts. Hume’s theory, however, has some counter-intuitive consequences. The failure...

The various texts on courtesy, manners, etiquette, and taste—savoire vivre in French and urbanidad in the Hispanic tradition—constitute an essential source for the study of the evolution of social conduct. These publications reflect the systematization of social practices prevalent in a given place at a given time and, above all, they are the testimonies of its idealization transmitted by those...

Mobile agent structuring is an increasingly practiced branch of distributed computing software engineering. In this paper we discuss the major issues encountered in producing real-time (RT) agents which are designed to perform output actions in manners meeting specified timing requirements. An approach to structuring of RT agents which is an extension of a highlevel real-time distributed object...

The different manners of embedding subgraphs of many disjoint edges in a parent graph arise in several different chemical and physical contexts. The problem of enumeration, or more generally of weighted summation, of such embeddings seems quite difficult to treat quantitatively, at least for general extended graphs. The special extended parent graph treated here with the inclusion of interactio...