We demonstrate a simple physical fabrication method to control surface roughness of Janus micromotors and fabricate self-propelled active Janus microparticles with rough catalytic platinum surfaces that show a four-fold increase in their propulsion speed compared to conventional Janus particles coated with a smooth Pt layer.

Conventional fault-tolerant distributed transactions layer a traditional concurrency control protocol on top of the Paxos consensus protocol. This approach provides scalability, availability, and strong consistency. When used for wide-area storage, however, this approach incurs crossdata-center coordination twice, in serial: once for concurrency control, and then once for consensus. In this pap...

Colloidal particles with two or more different surface properties (Janus particles) are of interest in catalysis, biological imaging, and drug delivery. Eccentric nanoparticles are a type of Janus particle consisting of a shell that envelops the majority of a core particle, leaving a portion of the core surface exposed. Previous work to synthesize eccentric nanoparticles from silica and polysty...

Janus is a language designed for distributed constraint programming 12]. This paper describes jc, an eecient and portable sequential implementation of Janus, which compiles Janus programs down to C code. Careful attention to the C code generated, together with some simple local optimizations, allows the system to have fairly good performance despite the lack (at this time) of global ow analysis...

Interleukin (Ib12) has many effects on the function of natural killer and T cells, and is important in the control of cell-mediated immunity. IL-2 and IL-12 display many similar activities, yet each also induces a distinct set of responses. A human IL-12 receptor subunit has recently been cloned and, like the IL-2R,8 and IL-2R% is a member of the hematopoietic receptor superfamily; however, the...

Even though red blood cell (RBC) vesiculation is a well-documented phenomenon, notably in the context of RBC aging and blood transfusion, the exact signalling pathways and kinases involved in this process remain largely unknown. We have established a screening method for RBC vesicle shedding using the Ca(2+) ionophore ionomycin which is a rapid and efficient method to promote vesiculation. In o...

SHP-1, an src homology 2 (SH2) domain containing protein tyrosine phosphatase, functions as a negative regulator of signaling downstream of cytokine receptors, receptor tyrosine kinases and receptor complexes of the immune system. Dephosphorylation of receptors and/or receptor-associated kinases has been described as the mechanism for the function of SHP-1. Here we demonstrate a novel mechanism...

Ovarian carcinoma is the fifth leading cause of death among women in the United States. Persistent activation of STAT3 is frequently detected in ovarian carcinoma. STAT3 is activated by Janus family kinases (JAK) via cytokine receptors, growth factor receptor, and non-growth factor receptor tyrosine kinases. Activation of STAT3 mediates tumor cell proliferation, survival, motility, invasion, an...

Atractylodin is one of the major constituents of the rhizome of Atractylodes lancea, which is widely used in Korean traditional medicine as a remedy for the treatment of gastritis and gastric ulcers. Despite of a major constituent of widely used botanical to treat inflammatory responses little is known about anti-inflammatory effect of atractylodin in the human mast cell (HMC-1). Hence, we eval...

Cardiotrophin-1 (CT-1) is a 201 amino acid 1 member of the interleukin (IL)-6 cytokine superfamily, which includes leukemia inhibitory factor (LIF), ciliary neurotrophic factor, IL-11, and oncostatin M.2 Cardiotrophin-1 was discovered by Pennica et al2 via expression cloning of mouse embryoid bodies, using a cardiac myocyte hypertrophy screen to identify positive clones. CT-1 has hypertrophic a...