A water distribution network is one of the important parts of infrastructure systems. The efficient management and proactive planning of capital investment of these assets are fundamental for efficient and effective service delivered by water companies. The direct economic costs (i.e. rehabilitation investment, repair costs, water loss, etc.) as well as indirect costs (i.e. service and traffic ...

Metabolic suppression may have a role in cerebral protection. It is often assumed that the cerebral metabolic and protective effects of qualitative burst suppression are similar to those of the isoelectric encephalogram (EEG). We have examined the effect of different degrees of EEG suppression on blood flow and oxygen difference during general anaesthesia. We studied 11 patients undergoing gene...

Subthreshold continuous theta burst stimulation of the visual cortex has been reported to cause inhibitory effects on phosphene threshold. In contrast, we observed no inhibition in a former study applying higher stimulation intensities. The main discrepancies between our experiments and the former studies were stimulation intensity and coil type. We aimed at investigating the role of these fact...

BACKGROUND Cystatin C (cC) is a cysteine protease inhibitor that may influence immune response. Our aim was to test the effect of a high concentration of cC, characteristic for uremic patients, on neutrophil (PMN) apoptosis and respiratory burst, as well as the cC secretion from PMNs stimulated with proinflammatory cytokines. MATERIAL/METHODS PMNs from 35 healthy volunteers aged 27-61 years w...

General anesthesia is not a uniform state of the brain. Ongoing activity differs between light and deep anesthesia and cortical response properties are modulated in dependence of anesthetic dosage. We investigated how anesthesia level affects cross-modal interactions in primary sensory cortex. To examine this, we continuously measured the effects of visual and auditory stimulation during increa...

In order to explore the possible mechanisms by which ethologically relevant sounds can be extracted from complex auditory environments, this study examined the effects of weak noise on the rate-intensity functions (RIFs) of neurons responding to tone burst in the inferior colliculus (IC) of nine mice (Mus musculus Km). Under free field stimuli conditions, a total of 112 IC neurons were recorded...

Although a growing body of evidence suggests that plant polyphenols can modulate human immune responses, their simultaneous action on monocyte and neutrophil oxidative burst is currently poorly understood. Based on the hypothesis that various polyphenols contained in plant extracts might affect the oxidative burst of phagocytes, we evaluated the effects of ethanolic O. paradoxa extract polyphen...

This research seeks to evaluate damage on the fuel tank by an acoustic emission test when executing 20000 cycles fatigue test and thereafter burst test. Used gas cylinders in the experimental are three types as follows; one is sound cylinder, others are cylinders which contain longitudinal and transverse artificial defect. The size of artificial defect is a depth of 3 mm, width of 3 mm and leng...

The aim of the study was to compare the effect duration of two different protocols of repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) on saccade triggering. In four experiments, two regions (right frontal eye field (FEF) and vertex) were stimulated using a 1-Hz and a theta burst protocol (three 30Hz pulses repeated at intervals of 100ms). The same number of TMS pulses (600 pulses) was appli...

Bud burst is a decisive process in plant architecture that requires light in Rosa sp. This light effect was correlated with stimulation of sugar transport and metabolism in favor of bud outgrowth. We investigated whether sugars could act as signaling entities in the light-mediated regulation of vacuolar invertases and bud burst. Full-length cDNAs encoding two vacuolar invertases (RhVI1 and RhVI...