living organisms can sense and respond to external and internal stimuli. response isdemonstrated in many forms including modulation of gene expression profiles, motility,secretion, cell death, etc. nevertheless, all forms share a basic property: they depend on sensingsmall changes in the concentration of an effector molecule or subtle conformational changes ina protein and invoking the appropri...

A localized change in a protein, which occurs as a result of either ligand binding or single amino acid substitution, necessarily encounters the conformational uctuation of the rest of the protein. Both the entropy and the enthalpy associated with the change consist of contributions from uctuations in the atoms surrounding the localized site, but they compensate. A novel thermodynamic ensemble ...

Continuum solvent calculations of pKas and reduction potentials usually entail the use of a thermodynamic cycle to express the reaction free energy in terms of gas phase energies and free energies of solvation. In this work, we present a systematic study comparing the solution phase free energy changes obtained in this manner with those directly computed within the SMD solvation model against a...

The purpose of this study was to determine the effects of a particular psychological stress, exposure to an open-field, on plasma IL-6 activity in rats. Plasma IL-6 activity was 40.6 +/- 7.2 units/ml in control rats, 105 +/- 6.8 units/ml after 30 minutes exposure to an open-field, and 221 +/- 17 units/ml after 60 minutes of exposure (p = 0.0003). There was a positive correlation (r = .71, p = 0...

OBJECTIVES Many analytical methods are not very sensitive to change because of the difficulty of distinguishing short-term fluctuation from the developmental change of primary interest. The current project investigated one possible solution to this problem in the form of a measurement-burst design in which research participants perform several versions of each test at each measurement occasion....

General lifestyle activities were examined as a predictor of current cognition and cognitive change over a 6-year interval in older adults. Participants were drawn from a population-based longitudinal study, and they completed the Adelaide Activities Profile and a battery of tests measuring cognition and sensory functioning. Hierarchical regression analyses revealed that, after sensory function...

A moisture- electrical - temperature (MET) test is proposed to evaluate the outdoor reliability of high power blue LEDs, with and without phosphor, and to understand the degradation physics of LEDs under the environment of combined humidity, temperature and electrical stresses. The blue LEDs with phosphor will be the high power white LEDs. Scanning acoustic microscopy is used to examine the res...

It has been suggested that work characteristics, such as mental demands, job control, and occupational complexity, are prospectively related to cognitive function. However, current evidence on links between psychosocial working conditions and cognitive change over time is inconsistent. In this study, we applied the effort-reward imbalance model that allows to build on previous research on menta...

It is proposed that personality (conceptualized in terms of motives and psychological resources) changes normatively not only from young adulthood to middle age but also within middle age and that these changes take place in relation to social and biosocial change over the same period. Data from 123 women studied at ages 27, 43, 52, and 61 largely supported hypotheses about change in social rol...

BACKGROUND A Vygotskian framework links cognitive change to collaborative interaction with a more competent partner whereas a Piagetian perspective supports the view that cognitive conflict arising from peer interaction leads to cognitive change. AIMS The study investigated the effect of collaborative learning on children's problem-solving ability and whether differences in knowledge status o...