Synaptic plasticity in the central nervous system (CNS) of mammals has been discussed for many years. Several forms of synaptic plasticity of mammal’s CNS have been identified, such as those that occur in long-term potentiation (LTP). Different types of LTP have been observed in distinctive areas of the CNS of mammals. The hippocampus is one of the most important areas in the CNS that pla...

BOLD (blood oxygen level dependent) fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) is commonly used to study differences in neuronal activity between human populations. As the BOLD response is an indirect measure of neuronal activity, meaningful interpretation of differences in BOLD responses between groups relies upon a stable relationship existing between neuronal activity and the BOLD response...

Blood oxygen contrast-functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) signals are a convolution of neural and vascular components. Several studies indicate that task-related (T-fMRI) or resting-state (R-fMRI) responses linearly relate to hypercapnic task responses. Based on the linearity of R-fMRI and T-fMRI with hypercapnia demonstrated by different groups using different study designs, we hypoth...

The increase of relative cerebral blood flow (rCBF) may contribute for a change in blood oxygenation level dependent signal (BOLD). The main purpose of this study is to investigate some aspects of perfusional alterations in the human brain in response to a uniform stimulation: hypercapnia induced by breath holding. It was observed that the BOLD signal increased globally during hypercapnia and t...

Recent research investigations have reported the benefit of enhancing conventional AFM-based nanoscale machining operations by introduction high frequency vibrations between AFM tip and processed material. The technique relies on piezoelectric actuation is relatively straight forward to implement in practice. However, non-linearity actuators when operated under electric field conditions can aff...

3 "Humans are no longer the only and lonely ones that are capable of, and to some degree dependant on, the interpretation of signs." Frieder Nake

DNA barcoding first came to the attention in 2003 when Paul Hebert’s research group at the University of Guelph published a paper titled ‘Biological identifications through DNA barcodes’. The basic principle behind DNA barcoding is based on the fact that small DNA sequences are capable of identifying different species as well as they are able to differentiate them. This technique deals with a n...

Expansive clayey soils are highly moisture sensitive with respect to stress, deformation and strength. These soils exhibit extreme variation in deformation such as heaving, loss of shear strength under certain Moisture Content and settlement and shrinkage as the Moisture Content alters. Swelling is the process of increase in volume of soil that occurs during its interaction with water. Expansiv...

Tissue-type plasminogen activator (tPA) is a serine proteinase which plays important roles in functional and structural synaptic plasticity, neural migration, as well as excitotoxic injuries in several pathological situations including ischemic stroke, seizure and Alzheimer’s disease (AD). It has been suggested that a divalent cation zinc also plays pathological roles in ischemia and seizure. I...