BACKGROUND In this study we investigated the effects of the physical properties of xenon on respiratory mechanisms in pigs. METHODS With institutional approval, 10 female pigs (mean 25.2 (SD 2.5) kg) were anaesthetized with thiopental, remifentanil, and pancuronium. Gas flow and pressure were recorded continuously at the proximal end of the tracheal tube during constant flow ventilation for c...

Xenon anaesthesia appears to have minimal haemodynamic effects. The purpose of this randomised prospective study was to compare the cardiovascular effects of xenon and nitrous oxide in patients with known ischaemic heart disease. In 20 patients who were due to undergo coronary artery bypass graft surgery, 30 min following induction of anaesthesia with fentanyl 30 microg x kg(-1) and midazolam 0...

BACKGROUND While most anaesthetics are known to suppress immune reactions, data from experimental studies indicate the enhancement of reactivity to inflammatory stimulators under xenon treatment. We investigated the effect of xenon anaesthesia on leucocyte function in surgical patients. METHODS We performed a subgroup analysis of subjects undergoing xenon or sevoflurane anaesthesia in a rando...

Prolonged hypothermic storage causes ischemia-reperfusion injury (IRI) in the renal graft, which is considered to contribute to the occurrence of the delayed graft function (DGF) and chronic graft failure. Strategies are required to protect the graft and to prolong renal graft survival. We demonstrated that xenon exposure to human proximal tubular cells (HK-2) led to activation of range of prot...

Dopamine release in the nucleus accumbens (NAC) plays a crucial role in the action of various psychotropic and addictive drugs, such as antagonists of the N-methyl-D-aspartate subtype of the glutamate. Although both nitrous oxide and xenon are N-methyl-D-aspartate receptor antagonists, they differ in their potential for producing neuropsychological toxicity; therefore, we decided to examine the...

BACKGROUND It is not readily obvious whether an intravascular bubble will grow or shrink in a particular tissue bed. This depends on the constituent gases initially present in the bubble, the surrounding tissue, and the delivered gas admixture. The authors used a computational model based on the physics of gas exchange to predict cerebrovascular embolism behavior during xenon anesthesia. METH...

We present Xenon, a natural language generation system capable of distinguishing between nearsynonyms. It integrates a near-synonym choice module with an existing sentence realization module. We evaluate Xenon using English and French nearsynonyms.

Since the observation of a xenon binding site in the interior of myoglobin,1 the interactions of proteins with xenon have been studied with the goal of using the inert gas as a biomolecular probe. Xenon is relatively small and hydrophobic, and it binds weakly (K < ∼102 M-1) to the nonpolar interiors of many proteins with little perturbation to the protein structure.2 The sensitivity of the xeno...

The South Pole Telescope (SPT) has probed an expanded angular range of the CMB temperature power spectrum. Their recent analysis of the latest cosmological data prefers nonzero neutrino masses, ∑ mν = 0.32 ± 0.11 eV. This result, if confirmed by the upcoming Planck data, has deep implications on the discovery of the nature of neutrinos. In particular, the values of the effective neutrino mass m...

The mortality rate from acute kidney injury after major cardiovascular operations can be as high as 60%, and no therapies have been proved to prevent acute kidney injury in this setting. Here, we show that preconditioning with the anesthetic gas xenon activates hypoxia-inducible factor 1alpha (HIF-1alpha) and its downstream effectors erythropoietin and vascular endothelial growth factor in a ti...