To grow and develop optimally, all organisms need to perceive and process information from both their biotic and abiotic surroundings. A particularly important environmental cue is light, to which organisms respond in many different ways. The responses can be simple, as in phototactic single-celled organisms, or complex, as in higher animals, which use visual inputs to modify their behavior. Ma...

Recently, it has been shown that a number of hydroxypyridinones such as 1,2-dimethyl-3-hydroxypyridin-4-one (L1) are useful for the treatment of iron overload in place of desferrioxamine in thalassaemic patients. In this study, the intestinal absorption (I.A.) of L1 and one of its analogues namely 2-methy-3-hydroxypyridin-4-one (L2), which possesses a higher partition coefficient (Kpart) than L...

background and aims: whole body vibration (wbv) transmitted to drivers is one of the main reasons for several different symptoms such as musculoskeletal disorders. one of the recommendations to decrease the effects of whole body vibration is using a device that acts as an isolator. in this study, we used an air cushion as a device to decrease wbv. we measured whole body vibration transmitted to...

the effect of ethanol-water media on the synthesis of ag/tio2 nanocomposite was investigated with 0.05, 0.1 and 0.5 (wt.%) of ag content. ethanol was used as hole-scavenger enhancing the photodecomposition of ag+ ions under illumination of near-uv light. the nanocomposites were further calcined to 300˚c and 400˚c under controlled atmosphere. the synthesized nanocomposites were tested for photoc...

Exploitation influences community structure directly through preferential removal of larger-bodied fishes and indirectly because larger-bodied fishes may exert top-down control upon other community members. We consider the direct and indirect effects of subsistence exploitation upon the size structure of coral reef fish communities along an island-scale spatial gradient of fishing intensity. We...

New complexity results are derived. It is shown that the two machine flow shop problem with a single server is NP-hard if either the setup times or the processing times are constant. Furthermore, polynomial algorithms are given for special cases in which both setup times and processing times are constant. Flow-shop problems with a single server are generalizations of classical flow-shop problem...

Introduction Numerous clinical studies have used voxel based analysis of diffusion tensor (DT) invariants, such as fractional anisotropy (FA) [1], to investigate group differences in white matter (see [2] for a review). However, results are difficult to interpret in regions with crossing fibres due to the simple Gaussian diffusion model assumed with the DT. High Angular Resolution Diffusion-wei...

catalyzing the conversion of the androgens, androstenedione (AD) and testosterone to the estrogens, estrone and estradiol, respectively. This process appears to proceed with three oxygenations of the androgens, each of which requires 1 mol of O2 and 1 mol of reduced nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide phosphate (NADPH). The 19-methyl group, as well as 1b and 2b-hydrogens, are eliminated in the th...

A subset of mammalian retinal ganglion cells expresses an opsin photopigment (melanopsin, Opn4) and is intrinsically photosensitive. The human retina contains melanopsin, but the literature lacks a direct investigation of its spectral sensitivity or G-protein selectivity. Here, we address this deficit by studying physiological responses driven by human melanopsin under heterologous expression i...