During locomotion over land, vertebrates' limb bones are exposed to loads. Like most biological structures, limb bones have a capacity to withstand greater loads than they usually experience, termed a safety factor (SF). How diverse are limb-bone SFs, and what factors correlate with such variation? We have examined these questions from two perspectives. First, we evaluated locomotor SF for the ...

A feedlot growth-performance trial involving 64 yearling steers and a metabolism trial involving four steers with cannulas in the rumen, proximal duodenum, and distal ileum were conducted to evaluate the comparative feeding value of steam-flaked corn (SFC, density = .30 kg/liter) and sorghum (SFS, density = .36 kg/liter) in finishing diets supplemented with or without .75% sodium bicarbonate (B...

Activated monocytes play an important role in the pathogenesis of inflammatory arthritis. Blood monocytes which enter the inflamed joint become activated upon adherence to extracellular matrix and exposure to a complex inflammatory environment. We have analyzed the mechanism of monocyte activation by soluble factors present in inflammatory synovial fluid (SF). Greater than 75% of inflammatory S...

The abilities to build precise human kinematic models and to perform accurate human motion tracking are essential in a wide variety of applications such as ergonomic design, biometrics, anthropological studies, entertainment, human computer interfaces for intelligent environments, and surveillance. Due to the complexity of the human bodies and the problem of self-occlusion, modeling and trackin...

Over the last decade we have witnessed the relentless technological improvement in flash-based solidstate drives (SSDs) and they have many advantages over hard disk drives (HDDs) as a secondary storage such as performance and power consumption. However, the random write performance in SSDs still remains as a concern. Even in modern SSDs, the disparity between random and sequential write bandwid...

The sample frequency spectrum (SFS), which describes the distribution of mutant alleles in a sample of DNA sequences, is a widely used summary statistic in population genetics. The expected SFS has a strong dependence on the historical population demography and this property is exploited by popular statistical methods to infer complex demographic histories from DNA sequence data. Most, if not a...

INTRODUCTION The endocannabinoid system modulates function of immune cells and mesenchymal cells such as fibroblasts, which contribute to cartilage destruction in rheumatoid arthritis (RA). The aim of the study was to determine the influence of N-acylethanolamines anandamide (AEA), palmitoylethanolamine (PEA) and oleylethanolamine (OEA) on several features of arthritic inflammation in vitro (hu...