We intended to determine if acute baroreflex activation therapy (BAT) increases venous capacitance and aortic conductance. BAT is effective in resistant hypertension, but its effect on the systemic vasculature is poorly understood. Left ventricular (LV) and aortic pressures and subdiaphragmatic aortic and caval flows (ultrasonic) were measured in six anesthetized dogs. Changes in abdominal bloo...

As potential activators of brown adipose tissue (BAT), mild cold exposure and sympathomimetic drugs have been considered as treatments for obesity and diabetes, but whether they activate the same pathways is unknown. In 10 healthy human volunteers, we found that the sympathomimetic ephedrine raised blood pressure, heart rate, and energy expenditure, and increased multiple circulating metabolite...

We combined novel radiocarbon dates of bat fossils with time-scaled ecological niche models (ENM) to study bat extinctions in the Caribbean. Radiocarbon-dated fossils show that late Quaternary losses of bat populations took place during the late Holocene (<4 ka) rather than late Pleistocene (>10 ka). All bat radiocarbon dates from Abaco (Bahamas) that represent extirpated populations are younge...

Measurements on the swing of a baseball bat are analyzed to extract the basic mechanics of the swing. The force acting on the bat is determined from the velocity of the center of mass, and the angular velocity of the bat provides additional information on the couple exerted by the two hands. The motion of the bat was calculated for other force-couple combinations to determine their effects on t...

Both classical brown adipocytes and brown-like beige adipocytes are considered as promising therapeutic targets for obesity; however, their development, relative importance and functional coordination are not well understood. Here we show that a modest expression of miR-378/378* in adipose tissue specifically increases classical brown fat (BAT) mass, but not white fat (WAT) mass. Remarkably, BA...

We investigated whether phonological relationships at the lexical level affect syntactic encoding during sentence production. Cleland and Pickering (2003) showed that syntactic priming effects are enhanced by semantic, but not phonological relations between lexical items, suggesting that there are no effects of phonology on syntactic encoding. Here we report four experiments investigating the i...

Metaheuristic techniques have been recently used to counter the problems like slow convergence to global minima and network stagnancy in backpropagation neural network (BPNN) algorithm. Previously, a meta-heuristic search algorithm called Bat was proposed to train BPNN to achieve fast convergence in the neural network. Although, Bat-BP algorithm achieved fast convergence but it had a problem of...

Increasing energy expenditure through activation of endogenous brown adipose tissue (BAT) is a potential approach to treat obesity and diabetes. The class of β3-adrenergic receptor (AR) agonists stimulates rodent BAT, but this activity has never been demonstrated in humans. Here we determined the ability of 200 mg oral mirabegron (Myrbetriq, Astellas Pharma, Inc.), a β3-AR agonist currently app...

Non-shivering thermogenesis in brown adipose tissue (BAT) plays an important role in thermoregulatory cold-defense and, through its metabolic consumption of energy reserves to produce heat, can affect the long-term regulation of adiposity. An orexinergic pathway from the perifornical lateral hypothalamus (PeF/LH) to the rostral raphe pallidus (rRPa) has been demonstrated to increase the gain of...

PURPOSE To investigate the feasibility of using IDEAL (Iterative Decomposition with Echo Asymmetry and Least squares estimation) fat-water imaging and the resultant fat fraction metric in detecting brown adipose tissue (BAT) in mice, and in differentiating BAT from white adipose tissue (WAT). MATERIALS AND METHODS Excised WAT and BAT samples and whole-mice carcasses were imaged with a rapid t...