Sperm DNA integrity is essential for accurate transmission of genetic material to offspring. Fragmentation of genomic DNA is an initial hallmark of apoptosis (programmed cell death). The aim of this study was to determine sperm nuclear DNA integrity and mitochondrial function, to quantify possible apoptosis and to investigate any relationship between these parameters. Semen samples (n = 25) wer...

OBJECTIVE To examine the presence of cleaved poly(ADP-ribose) polymerase(s) (cPARP) in ejaculated spermatozoa and determine cPARP levels following exposure to chemical or oxidative stress. DESIGN Prospective pilot study. SETTING Tertiary care academic hospital. PATIENT(S) Eight healthy men. INTERVENTION(S) Semen specimens were collected, prepared with double-density-gradient centrifugat...

Nonexercise activity thermogenesis (NEAT) accounts for the vast majority of nonresting metabolic rate and changes in NEAT-predicted susceptibility to fat gain with overfeeding. Measuring physical activity and its components in free-living humans has been a long-standing challenge. In this study, we combine information about lightweight sensors that capture data on body position and motion with ...

Obesity occurs when energy intake exceeds energy expenditure over a protracted period of time. The energy expenditure associated with everyday activity is called NEAT (Nonexercise activity thermogenesis). NEAT varies between two people of similar size by 2000 kcal day(-1) because of people's different occupations and leisure-time activities. Data support the central hypothesis that NEAT is pivo...

In nature, ants in a colony often work together to complete a common task. We want to see if we can simulate this phenomenon. We create a simulation that looks at predator prey interactions based o↵ of the 1991 SimAnt game. In this game a spider attempts to eat individual ants from a colony, but if the ants form a large enough swarm they can work together to eat the spider. The question we are ...

We present a property of neat reducts commuting with forming subalgebras as a definability condition. The purpose of this paper is to relate results on neat reducts, a notion particular to cylindric algebras to results on the “more universal” strong amalgamation property in a very general setting. It is known [7], [8] and [6] that amalgamation properties in a class of algebras correspond to int...

In this issue of Neuron, Kiani et al. (2015) show that the correlated activity of multiple simultaneously recorded neurons can be used to identify, in a completely un-biased manner, distinct functional domains within prefrontal and (pre)motor cortex of macaque monkeys.

this paper will introduce a new method to obtain the order weightsof the ordered weighted averaging (owa) operator. we will first show therelation between fuzzy quantifiers and neat owa operators and then offer anew combination of them. fuzzy quantifiers are applied for soft computingin modeling the optimism degree of the decision maker. in using neat operators,the ordering of the inputs is not...

The human pathogen Staphylococcus aureus acquires heme iron from hemoglobin (Hb) via the action of a series of iron-regulated surface determinant (Isd) proteins. The cell wall anchored IsdB protein is recognized as the predominant Hb receptor, and is comprised of two NEAr transporter (NEAT) domains that act in concert to bind, extract, and transfer heme from Hb to downstream Isd proteins. Struc...

Evolution of neural networks, through genetic algorithms or otherwise, hasrecently emerged as a possible way to solve challenging reinforcement learningproblems; NEAT (or NeuroEvolution of Augmenting Topologies), is a particularlypowerful such method. Because it is based on evolving a population of solutions,where individuals are evaluated on a number of test episodes, the c...