BACKGROUND Curcumin (diferuloymethane) is the active ingredient of the dietary spice turmeric. Curcumin modulates various signalling molecules, including inflammatory agents, transcription factors, protein kinases and cell cycle regulatory proteins. The purpose of this study was to determine if curcumin had an effect on gallbladder motility. METHODS A pharmacologic in vitro technique was used...

Abstract. The relaxation spectrum is an important tool for studying the behaviour of viscoelastic materials. The most popular procedure is to use data from a small-amplitude oscillatory shear experiment to determine the parameters in a multi-mode Maxwell model. However, the discrete relaxation times appear nonlinearly in the mathematical model for the relaxation modulus. The indirect calculatio...

We have recently developed a technique for characterizing the magnetic components within natural particle assemblages. This technique is based on the transformation of magnetization data from first-order reversal curves (FORCs) into contour plots of a 2-D distribution function (FORC diagrams). FORC diagrams are useful for obtaining information about switching fields and interactions in magnetic...

Solving a set of simultaneous linear equations is probably the most important topic in numerical methods. For solving linear equations, iterative methods are preferred over the direct methods specially when the coefficient matrix is sparse. The rate of convergence of iteration method is increased by using Successive Relaxation (SR) technique. But SR technique is very much sensitive to relaxatio...

relaxation is one of the important mental skills in physical education and sportsactivities. relationship between relaxation and rhythmic exercises with anemphasis on flexibility-functional mechanisms of nervous system has receivedattention in recent studies. the aim of the present study was to investigate the effectof rhythmic exercises on deepening the relaxation of national judo athletes. fo...

abstract introduction: hypertension is one of the most prevalent chronic diseases worldwide. because of its chronicity, hypertension requires life-long therapy. many patients tend to discontinue therapy and seek alternative treatments. in this study, we evaluated the efficacy of two behavioral therapeutic techniques, namely relaxation and biofeedback-assisted relaxation in reducing blood pressu...

The widespread use of relaxation technique amongst medicine community and sustained work environments makes a more complete understanding of its physiological effects. This research proposes a systematic evaluation for relaxation circumstances, which consists of subjective evidence and objective evidence. Innovative feature of this evaluation system is adding bio-neurological signals to support...

We extend a relaxation technique due to Bertsimas and Niño-Mora for the restless bandit problem to the case where arbitrary costs penalize switching between the bandits. We also construct a one-step lookahead policy using the solution of the relaxation. Computational experiments and a bound for approximate dynamic programming provide some empirical support for the heuristic.

This paper deals with multi-component machine repair model having provision of warm standby units and repair facility consisting of two heterogeneous servers (primary and secondary) to provide repair to the failed units. The failure of operating and standby units may occur individually or due to some common cause. The primary server may fail partially following full failure whereas secondary se...