Background: Lipopolysaccharides (LPS), cleared from the blood by Kupffer cells, induce hypertriglyceridemia. Aims: To test the hypothesis that GdCl3, through inhibition of large Kupffer cell activity, modulates LPS-induced hyperlipidemia in rats. Methods: Male Wistar rats received a single intravenous injection of GdCl3 (10 mg/kg) or saline, 24 h before intraperitoneal LPS (1.5 mg/kg) administr...

The ``Petlyuk'' or ``dividing-wall'' or ``fully thermally coupled'' distillation column is an interesting alternative to the conventional cascaded binary columns for separation of multi-component mixtures. However, the industrial use has been limited, and diculties in operation have been reported as one reason. With three product compositions controlled, the system has two degrees of freedom l...

A series DC motor must be represented by a nonlinear model when nonlinearities such as magnetic saturation are considered. To provide effective control, nonlinearities and uncertainties in the model must be taken into account in the control design. In this paper, the recursive design method is applied to generate nonlinear control, nonlinear PI control, and robust control, and these controls ar...

Two series of experiments are reported which result in the discrimination between Helicobacter pylori and other bacterial gastroesophageal isolates using a newly developed odour generating system, an electronic nose and a hybrid intelligent odour recognition system. In the first series of experiments, after 5 h of growth (37°C), 53 volatile ‘sniffs’ were collected over the headspace of complex ...

Maximum Likelihood (ML) estimation based Expectation Maximization (EM) [IEEE Trans Med Imag, MI-1 (2) (1982) 113] reconstruction algorithm has shown to provide good quality reconstruction for positron emission tomography (PET). Our previous work [IEEE Trans Med Imag, 7(4) (1988) 273; Proc IEEE EMBS Conf, 20(2/6) (1998) 759] introduced the multigrid (MG) and multiresolution (MR) concept for PET ...

This article describes recent efforts to build a worldwide evaluation community. It notes events that led to an almost 200 percent growth in the number of regional and national evaluation organizations in slightly more than one year. Pro®les are provided on the present status of many national and regional evaluation organizations that participated in the W.K. Kellogg Foundation-sponsored intern...

SO2 emissions lead to various harmful effects on environment and human health. The SO2 emission in China has significant contribution to the global SO2 emission, so it is necessary to employ various methods to study SO2 emissions in China with great details in order to lay the foundation for policymaking to improve environmental conditions in China. Network analysis is used to analyze the SO2 e...

BACKGROUND The proximity of capillaries, arterioles, and venules provides complex spatial relationships that lead to oxygen transfer among microvessels. Although a conceptual image of complex oxygen transfer among microvessels has been hypothesized, in vivo mapping of oxygen saturation (SO2) levels in microvessels had never been performed. METHODS AND RESULTS The oxygen profile of the arterio...

During combustion of alternative fuels in the material inlet end of cement rotary kilns, local reducing conditions may occur and cause reductive decomposition of sulfates from calcined cement raw materials. Decomposition of sulfates is problematic because it increases the gas-phase SO2 concentration, whichmay cause deposit formation in the kiln system. In this study, the release of sulfur from ...

We have carried out an ab initio molecular dynamics study on the sulfur dioxide (SO2) solvation in 1-ethyl-3-methylimidazolium thiocyanate for which we have observed that both cations and anions play an essential role in the solvation of SO2. Whereas, the anions tend to form a thiocyanate- and much less often an isothiocyanate-SO2 adduct, the cations create a "cage" around SO2 with those groups...