Variation in longevity in natural populations is attributable to the segregation of multiple interacting loci, whose effects are sensitive to the environment. Although there has been considerable recent progress towards understanding the environmental factors and genetic pathways that regulate lifespan, little is known about the genes causing naturally occurring variation in longevity. Previous...

This paper describes a new speech corpus, STC-TIMIT, and discusses the process of design, development and its distribution through LDC. The STC-TIMIT corpus is derived from the widely used TIMIT corpus by sending it through a real and single telephone channel. TIMIT is phonetically balanced, covers the dialectal diversity in continental USA and has been extensively used as a benchmark for speec...

BACKGROUND/AIMS While the range of therapeutic options for well-differentiated gastroenteropancreatic neuroendocrine tumors has recently increased with the emergence of targeted therapies, such as mTOR inhibitors, there is no recent progress in the treatment of poorly differentiated neuroendocrine carcinomas (PDNECs). Since PDNECs have been shown to strongly express mTOR pathway components, the...

BACKGROUND It has been suggested that slow transit constipation (STC) may be part of a panenteric motor disorder. AIM To evaluate motility of an upper gastrointestinal organ, the gall bladder, in 16 patients with STC and 20 healthy controls. METHODS Gall bladder emptying (ultrasonography) was studied in response to neural, cephalic-vagal stimulation with modified sham feeding (MSF) for 90 m...

Reading skills are indispensible in modern technological societies. In transparent alphabetic orthographies, such as Dutch, reading skills build on associations between letters and speech sounds (LS pairs). Previously, we showed that the superior temporal cortex (STC) of Dutch readers is sensitive to the congruency of LS pairs. Here, we used functional magnetic resonance imaging to investigate ...

Fatty acid-induced stimulation of enteroendocrine cells leads to release of the hormones such as cholecystokinin (CCK) that contribute to satiety. Recently, the fatty acid activated G protein-coupled receptor GPR120 has been shown to mediate long-chain unsaturated free fatty acid-induced CCK release from the enteroendocrine cell line, STC-1, yet the downstream signaling pathway remains unclear....

BACKGROUND ST changes related to ischemia at different heart rates (HRs) have not been well described. We aimed to analyze ST dynamic changes by vectorcardiography (VCG) during pacing-induced HR changes for subjects with proven coronary artery disease (CAD) and without (non-CAD). METHODS Symptomatic CAD patients scheduled for elective surgery were enrolled along with a non-CAD group. During a...

The potential role of cell surface sialomucin in preventing natural killer (NK)-mediated lysis of tumor cell targets has been addressed by comparing the properties of 2 NK-resistant [ascites (ASC) and short-term cultured (STC)] and 2 NK-susceptible [tunicamycin-treated (TUN) and long-term cultured (LTC)] preparations of 13762 MAT-B1 rat mammary tumor cells. Both the ASC and STC cell preparation...

Bone morphogenetic proteins (BMPs) belong to the transforming growth factor superfamily and have been implicated in chondrogenesis and neuronal differentiation. In order to examine the function of bone morphogenetic protein 2 (BMP‑2) on the differentiation of nitrergic enteric neurons in slow transit constipation (STC), the expression of BMP‑2 and neuronal nitric oxide synthase (nNOS) was inves...

Social networks often provide only a binary perspective on social ties: two individuals are either connected or not. While sometimes external information can be used to infer the strength of social ties, access to such information may be restricted or impractical. Sintos and Tsaparas (KDD 2014) first suggested to infer the strength of social ties from the topology of the network alone, by lever...