In humans, weak transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) modulates excitability in the motor, visual, and prefrontal cortex. Periods rich in slow-wave sleep (SWS) not only facilitate the consolidation of declarative memories, but in humans, SWS is also accompanied by a pronounced endogenous transcortical DC potential shift of negative polarity over frontocortical areas. To experimentally ...

The neurotransmitter acetylcholine is considered essential for proper functioning of the hippocampus-dependent declarative memory system, and it represents a major neuropharmacological target for the treatment of memory deficits, such as those in Alzheimer's disease. During slow-wave sleep (SWS), however, declarative memory consolidation is particularly strong, while acetylcholine levels in the...

The subthalamic nucleus (STN) powerfully controls basal ganglia outputs and has been implicated in movement disorders observed in Parkinson's disease because of its pathological mixed burst firing mode and hyperactivity. A recent study suggested that reciprocally connected glutamatergic STN and GABAergic globus pallidus (GP) neurons act in vitro as a generator of bursting activity in basal gang...

The present study describes how the frequency receptive fields (RF) of auditory thalamus neurons are modified when the state of vigilance of an unanesthetized animal naturally fluctuates among wakefulness (W), slow-wave sleep (SWS), and paradoxical sleep (PS). Systematic quantification of several RF parameters-including strength of the evoked responses, response latency, acoustic threshold, sha...

Traditional Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) focuses on the integration of application interfaces by pipelining different middleware technologies like message queuing or remote method invocations. Web Service enabled Service-Oriented Architectures (SOAs) used in EAI were a step towards providing an abstraction layer for the involved interfaces by using the Web Service Description Langua...

Previous studies have indicated that peripheral achromatic grating resolution is limited by the sampling density of the neural array (sampling limited), and largely unaffected by large amounts of optical defocus and significant changes in luminance. Under certain conditions, peripheral short-wavelength sensitive (SWS) grating acuity is also sampling limited. We wished to determine how the sampl...

To assess the value of conventional ultrasound, conventional strain elastography (CSE) and acoustic radiation force impulse (ARFI) elastography in differentiating likelihood of malignancy for Bethesda category III thyroid nodules. 103 thyroid nodules with Bethesda category III results on fine-needle aspiration cytology (FNAC) in 103 patients were included and all were pathologically confirmed a...

Although rapid eye movement sleep (REM) is regularly implicated in emotional memory consolidation, the role of slow-wave sleep (SWS) in this process is largely uncharacterized. In the present study, we investigated the relative impacts of nocturnal SWS and REM upon the consolidation of emotional memories using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and polysomnography (PSG). Participants ...

Semantics are used to mark up a wide variety of data-centric Web resources but, are not used in significant numbers to annotate online services— that is despite considerable research dedicated to Semantic Web Services (SWS). This is partially due to the complexity of comprehensive SWS models aiming at automation of service-oriented tasks such as discovery, composition, and execution. This has l...

Square-wave (SW) switching of the lasing direction in a semiconductor ring laser (SRL) is investigated using counter-directional mutual feedback. The SRL is electrically biased to a regime that supports lasing in either counter-clockwise (CCW) or clockwise (CW) direction. The CCW and CW modes are then counter-directionally coupled by optical feedback, where the CCW-to-CW and CW-to-CCW feedback ...