The present study examined the incidence of chronic stress in business executives (109 subjects: 75 male and 34 female) and its relationship with cortisol levels, cognitive performance, and autonomic nervous system (ANS) reactivity after an acute mental stressor. Blood samples were collected from the subjects to measure cortisol concentration. After the sample collection, the subjects completed...

This study aims to compare the effects of social instability stress on memory and anxiety- and depressive-like behaviour between sham-operated controls and ovariectomised (OVX) rats. Forty adult female Sprague-Dawley rats (8 weeks old) were randomly divided into four groups, (n = 10 per group). These were non-stressed sham-operated control rats, stressed sham-operated control rats, non-stressed...

Drought is an important yield-reducing factor for corn and soya bean which are the two major crops in the Delaware, Maryland and Virginia (Delmarva) region of the United States. Cowpea (Vigna unguiculata L. Walp.) is primarily grown in drier regions of the world where it is one of the most drought-resistant food legumes. Field experiments were conducted in which 10 genetically diverse cowpea ge...

We investigated the influence of stress on the acoustic wave propagation in single crystalline heterostructures using a transfer matrix method. Both Rayleigh-type and Sezawa modes exhibit an acoustoelastic anomaly, where the stress-induced change of the phase velocity is maximum for finite film thicknesses, considerably smaller than the acoustic wavelength. For Ge/Si~001! compressed by 1 GPa th...

An organism placed under stress prioritizes activities essential for immediate survival, postponing or abandoning less pressing concerns. This is true at the cellular level, too; stressed cells can modify their systems to cope with damage and even prioritize protein translation toward those genes that will help them overcome the crisis (1). Crucial to this effort are cytoplasmic stress granules...

Balancing the capacity for protein maturation with changes in protein flux through the endoplasmic reticulum (ER) is crucial for maintaining ER homeostasis. In this issue, Merksamer et al. (2008) exploit a redox-sensitive fluorescent protein to monitor the environment inside the ER of living yeast, illuminating how this organelle responds to different perturbations.

Diabetic nephropathy is the most common cause of ESRD in the United States.1 Although current strategies can slow disease progression,2,3 development of renal failure requiring renal replacement therapy is a distressingly common outcome in patients with diabetes.1 As a result, much effort has been devoted to understanding the mechanisms that promote glomerular damage in diabetic kidney disease ...

OBJECTIVE In a previous study, we observed that associations between APOE rs439401 and metabolic traits were moderated by chronic stress. Thus, in a population of stressed and non-stressed Danish men, we examined whether associations between APOE rs439401 and a panel of metabolic quantitative traits, all metabolic traits which may lead to T2D and CVD were moderated by psychological stress. ME...

This work is couched in the Articulatory Phonology theoretical framework, and it discusses the possible role of speech rate on diachronic change from antepenultimate stress words to penultimate stress words. In this kind of change, there is deletion of the medial (or final) post-stressed vowel of the antepenultimate stress words. Our results suggest that speech rate can explain this historical ...

His-Asp phosphorylation pathways (also known as two-component systems) enable bacteria (and primitive eukaryotic cells and/or eukaryotic organelles) to make important adaptive decisions in response to fluctuations in intraor extracellular chemical and/or physical conditions. These sensory systems are composed of a dimeric sensor protein, with an input domain and histidine kinase domain (HK), an...