INTRODUCTION Novel safety flooring systems (SFs) show promise as an intervention to reduce fall-related injuries in seniors [1]. However, the protective capacity of SFs has never been assessed using experimental impact tests with humans. Furthermore, the influence of body mass index (BMI) on the protective capacity of SFs is unknown. Mechanically, soft tissue acts as a shock absorber by decreas...

Slow release formulations of the anionic herbicide sulfosulfuron (SFS) were prepared by incorporating it in micelles of an organic cation octadecyltrimethylammonium, which adsorb on the clay-mineral montmorillonite. The fraction of SFS adsorbed on the micelle-clay complex reached 98%, whereas for monomer-clay complexes, its adsorption was insignificant. Fluorescence studies showed surface conta...

BACKGROUND Actin stress fibers (SFs) are mechanosensitive structural elements that respond to forces to affect cell morphology, migration, signal transduction and cell function. Cells are internally stressed so that SFs are extended beyond their unloaded lengths, and SFs tend to self-adjust to an equilibrium level of extension. While there is much evidence that cells reorganize their SFs in res...

Actin stress fibers (SFs) of cells cultured on cyclically stretched substrate tend to reorient in the direction in which a normal strain of substrate becomes zero. However, little is known about the mechanism of this reorientation. Here we investigated the effects of cyclic stretch waveform on SF reorientation in osteoblastic cells. Cells adhering to silicone membranes were subjected to cyclic ...

Non-contact 3D surface measurement is an important problem for modern industry. Shape from shading (SFS) is a convenient method because it can recover the 3D shape only from one image. But the conventional SFS research has a lot of restriction, such as Lambertian illumination model. If the object isn’t under this model, the precision will decrease quickly. We proposed an improved SFS based on n...

It has recently been claimed that the outstanding performance of machine-learning scoring functions (SFs) is exclusively due to the presence of training complexes with highly similar proteins to those in the test set. Here, we revisit this question using 24 similarity-based training sets, a widely used test set, and four SFs. Three of these SFs employ machine learning instead of the classical l...

Various widely used radar image processing algorithms require considerable computing resources but can take advantage of a parallel implementation. We focus on the Shape-from-Shading (SfS) algorithm in its application to radar images. A given serial version of the SfS algorithm was parallelized and improved to handle large images. We experiment with parallelization techniques such as data decom...

PURPOSE To find out the possible role of 1,25(OH)₂ vitamin D₃ [1,25(OH)₂D₃] and parathyroid hormone (PTH) as intrinsic factors in urinary calcium stone formers (SFs), we investigated their relationship with serum and urinary biochemical parameters. MATERIALS AND METHODS A total of 326 calcium SFs (male: 204, female: 122) were enrolled and underwent outpatient metabolic evaluations including 1...

Normal development requires the right splice variants to be made in the right tissues at the right time. The core splicing machinery is engaged in all splicing events, but which precise splice variant is made requires the choice between alternative splice sites-for this to occur, a set of splicing factors (SFs) must recognize and bind to short RNA motifs in the pre-mRNA. In C. elegans, there is...

The sugar-flotation-sieving (SFS) and Baermann-funnel (BF) methods were compared for nematode extraction efficiency. The SFS method recovered nematodes from more trophic groups whereas greater total numbers of individuals were recovered by BF. In a test to validate the efficiency of SFS, virtually 100% of the nematodes added to desert soil prior to extraction were recovered by four consecutive ...