Corticotropin-releasing factor (CRF) is a neuropeptide associated with the integration of the physiological and behavioral responses to stress. Recently, CRF1 receptor antagonists have been shown to decrease cocaine self-administration and inhibit stress-induced reinstatement of cocaine-seeking behavior. The exact mechanisms underlying this effect are not clear. Based on the large amount of lit...

In this article, a new approach to tidal harmonic analysis is introduced. This approach incorporates more constituents in the least squares method for a fixed duration of noise-free tidal record and results in a more accurate tidal prediction. Moreover, it is demonstrated that 135 days of hourly data, which is significantly less than 369 days data in the Rayleigh criterion, is sufficient for th...

We report on progress in developing a magnetotelluric inversion method for two-dimensional anisotropic conductivity distribution. A standard two-dimensional model is discretized into a number of rectangular cells, each with a constant conductivity tensor, and the solution of the inverse problem is obtained by minimizing a global objective functional consisting of data misfit, a structural const...

BACKGROUND A nosocomial outbreak of multi-drug-resistant Acinetobacter calcoaceticus-A. baumannii (MDR-ACB) complex infection occurred in a newly constructed building at a 2,500-bed tertiary medical center in Taiwan. METHODS An investigation was carried out by molecular approaches to trace the bacteria. Antimicrobial susceptibilities, risk factors, and the occurrence of nosocomial MDR-ACB inf...

The olfactory receptor neuron (ORN) and behavioral responses of hybrids between the Asian corn borer (ACB), Ostrinia furnacalis, and the E-strain European corn borer (ECB(E)), Ostrinia nubilalis were examined and compared to the parental populations. In hybrids and both parents, the large-spike-size ORN was capable of responding to all four pheromone components of ACB and ECB, despite differenc...

Linear elements are least expensive finite elements for simultaneously recovering the source location and intensity in a general convection-diffusion process. However, the derivatives of the least-squares objective functional with Tikhonov regularizations are not well-defined when linear finite elements are used. In this work we provide a systematic formulation of the numerical inversion using ...

BACKGROUND A femoral nerve block (FNB) in combination with a sciatic nerve block (SNB) is commonly used for anesthesia and analgesia in patients undergoing hindfoot and ankle surgery. The effects of FNB on motor function, related fall risk, and rehabilitation are controversial. An adductor canal block (ACB) potentially spares motor fibers in the femoral nerve, but the comparative effect on hind...

The current study examined the effects of operant ethanol (EtOH) self-administration on gene expression kin the nucleus accumbens (ACB) and amygdala (AMYG) of inbred alcohol-preferring (iP) rats. Rats self-trained on a standard two-lever operant paradigm to administer either water-water, EtOH (15% v/v)-water, or saccharin (SAC; 0.0125% g/v)-water. Animals were killed 24 h after the last operant...

We investigated the benefit of incorporating a negativity penalty into a least-squares criterion used to reconstruct 3-D radiotracer distributions in cardiac SPECT studies. B-spline spatial basis functions were used to provide a continuous model for the 3-D tracer distribution. Spline coefficients that tended to have negative values were identified and were constrained to stay near zero with us...

Per temporal frequency component, the (least squares) Parabo-lic Radon Transform (PRT) is equivalent to the (least squares) Nonuniform Discrete Fourier Transform (NDFT). This can be used in two ways. Firstly, the efficiency of the PRT can be improved by using very fast algorithms for the calculation of the direct nonuniform Fourier transform. Secondly, comparing the PRT to the NDFT provides use...