The antimycotic agent amphotericin B (AmB) functions by forming complexes with sterols to form ion channels that cause membrane leakage. When AmB and cholesterol mixed at 2:1 ratio were incorporated into phospholipid bilayer membranes formed on the tip of patch pipettes, ion channel current fluctuations with characteristic open and closed states were observed. These channels were also functiona...

The crush behaviors of steel tubes filled with nanoporous-materials-functionalized liquids are experimentally investigated under quasi-static and dynamic conditions. Results show that the nanoporous-materials-functionalized liquid can enhance the load-carrying and the energy absorption capacities of thin-walled tubes, as the buckling mode is affected. The effective buckling stress increases wit...

Melatonin (MEL), the main product synthesized by the pineal gland, stimulates early and late stages of neurodevelopment in the adult brain. MEL increases dendrite length, thickness and complexity in the hilar and mossy neurons of hippocampus. Dendrite formation involves activation of Ca2+/Calmodulin (CaM)-dependent kinase II (CaMKII) by CaM. Previous work showed that MEL increased the synthesis...

We propose a wideband CELP-type speech coder at 16 kb/s based on a mel-generalized cepstral (MGC) analysis technique. MGC analysis makes it possible to obtain a more accurate representation of spectral zeros compared to linear predictive (LP) analysis and take a perceptual frequency scale into account. A major advantage of the proposed coder is that the benefits of MGC representation of speech ...

Nanoporous metals prepared via dealloying or selective leaching of solid solution alloys and compounds represent an emerging class of materials. They possess a three-dimensional (3D) structure of randomly interpenetrating ligaments/nanopores with sizes between 5 nm and several tens of micrometers, which can be tuned by varying their preparation conditions (such as dealloying time and temperatur...

Dyadic scheme of wavelet signal decomposition leads to a specific division of frequency bands. It is comparable to mel-frequency division and may be used in effective parameterization of speech signal in recognition systems, speech coding or other speech signal based applications. This paper discusses efficiency of different spectral distance measures applied to wavelet-parameterized speech. Th...