Avian sarcoma viruses (ASV) produced by Japanese quail embryo fibroblasts (QEF) were inactivated to the same degree as ASV produced by chick embryo fibroblasts (CEF), with or without complement, by rabbit antisera to CEF and to membrane antigens of chick embryo and adult chicken erythrocytes, in particular their unique age-specific antigens. ASV produced by duck embryo fibroblasts (DEF) were on...

During an Internet distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack, attackers pose as a superpower overloading bandwidth and services that otherwise would have been lightly used by genuine users. These legitimate users send few packets and occasionally back-off and fail while competing for resources. The Internet architecture provides only modest support for verifying the true origin of a packet or...

OBJECTIVE To demonstrate that use of lower doses of anti-snake venom is as effective as high doses and is associated with less complications and lower mortality especially in the wake of rising cost of medical treatment, the people most affected by snakebites being the poor farmers. METHODOLOGY A prospective descriptive study consisting of 54 snakebite patients fulfilling the inclusion criter...

Due to within-speaker variability in phonetic content and/or speaking style, the performance of automatic speaker verification (ASV) systems degrades especially when the enrollment and test utterances are short. This study examines how different types of variability influence performance of ASV systems. Speech samples (< 2 sec) from the UCLA Speaker Variability Database containing 5 different r...

Arsenic (As)-resistant bacteria are abundant in the rhizosphere and tissues of As-hyperaccumulator Pteris vittata. However, little is known about their roles in As transformation and As uptake in P. vittata. In this study, the impacts of P. vittata tissue extracts with or without surface sterilization on As transformation in solutions containing 100 μg L-1 AsIII or AsV were investigated. After ...

Nafion-coated bismuth film electrodes (NCBFEs) and Nafion-coated mercury film electrodes (NCMFEs) were used to electrochemically preconcentrate metal analytes for subsequent analysis by inductively coupled plasma-mass spectrometry (ICP-MS). Either type of electrodes is part of a thin-layer electrochemical flow cell that is positioned upstream of a microconcentric nebulizer for the ICP-MS. Perfo...

The risk of hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) development is reduced following viral elimination by interferon therapy in chronic hepatitis C patients. However, the risk in patients treated with interferon-free direct-acting antivirals (DAAs) is unknown. We evaluated chronic hepatitis C patients who achieved viral eradication by pegylated-interferon plus ribavirin (PEG-IFN/RBV, n = 244) or daclata...

Corticotropin-releasing factor (CRF) is one of the principle components of the stress response. The physiological effects of CRF are mediated by two receptor subtypes, CRF(1) and CRF(2). Recent data obtained with the selective CRF(2) antagonist antisauvagine-30 (ASV-30) has begun to suggest that both CRF receptor subtypes may play a role in stress-related behaviors. Exactly how these two recept...

The aim of Automatic Speaker Verification (ASV) is to detect whether a speech segment has been uttered by the claimed identity or by an impostor. Our contribution includes the distribution of BECARS , a free software based on Gaussian Mixture Models (GMM) for Automatic Speaker Verification (ASV), and the design of a new methodology to estimate the decision score in an ASV system. BECARS in avai...

Pulmonary fibrosis is a devastating lung disorder with mysterious pathogenesis and limited treatment options. It is well-recognized that the uncontrolled proliferation of lung fibroblasts and differentiation of fibroblasts into myofibroblasts excessively produce extracellular matrix (ECM) proteins which contribute to the fibrosis change of the lungs. Thus, blocking ECM accumulation would delay ...