BACKGROUND Although a clear negative influence of chronic exposure to stressful experiences has been repeatedly demonstrated, the outcome of acute stress on key brain regions has only just started to be elucidated. Although it has been proposed that acute stress may produce enhancement of brain plasticity and that antidepressants may prevent such changes, we still lack ultrastructural evidence ...

We study theoretically the fluctuation-induced structural force in nematic systems frustrated by external fields. We focus on the uniform director structure in the hybrid-aligned film characterized by opposing surface fields and in the Freedericksz cell where frustration arises from competing bulk and surface fields. We find that frustration gives rise to several interesting features of the int...

The optical and structural properties of dense colloidal suspensions in the presence of long-range electrostatic repulsion are determined from both light and small-angle neutron scattering experiments. Short-range structural order induces an enhancement of the scattering strength while at the same time the total transmission shows strong wavelength dependence, reminiscent of a photonic crystal....

Experimental and theoretical studies on the compositional dependence of stability and compressibility in lithiated cubic titania are presented. The crystalline-to-amorphous phase transition pressure increases monotonically with Li concentration (from ∼17.5  GPa for delithiated to no phase transition for fully lithiated cubic titania up to 60 GPa). The associated enhancement in structural stabil...

bermudagrass [cynodon dactylon (l.) pers.] is a perennial grass and has been long used as a medicinal herb in iranian traditional medicine to treat varied ailments. different parts of bermudagrass such as leaves, stolons, rhizomes and culms are rich sources of metabolites such as proteins, carbohydrates, mineral constituents, β-sitosterol, flavonoids, alkaloids, glycosides and triterpenoides. g...

Managing for stand structural complexity in northern hardwood forests has been proposed as a method for promoting microhabitat characteristics important to eastern red-backed salamanders (Plethodon cinereus). We evaluated the effects of alternate, structure-based silvicultural systems on red-backed salamander populations at two research sites in northwestern Vermont. Treatments included two une...

Measurement of image similarity is important for a number of image processing applications. Image similarity assessment is closely related to image quality assessment in that quality is based on the apparent differences between a degraded image and the original, unmodified image. Automated evaluation of image compression systems relies on accurate quality measurement. Current algorithms for mea...

Surface- and tip-enhanced resonant Raman scattering (resonant SERS and TERS) by optical phonons in a monolayer of CdSe quantum dots (QDs) is demonstrated. The SERS enhancement was achieved by employing plasmonically active substrates consisting of gold arrays with varying nanocluster diameters prepared by electron-beam lithography. The magnitude of the SERS enhancement depends on the localized ...

In contrast to isometric and shortening contractions, many observations made on actively lengthening muscles cannot be readily explained with the sliding filament and cross-bridge theory. Specifically, residual force enhancement, the persistent increase in force following active muscle lengthening, beyond what one would expect based on muscle length, has not been explained satisfactorily. Here,...