State-of-the-art solvers for Quantified Boolean Formulas (QBF) have employed many techniques from the field of Boolean Satisfiability (SAT) including the use of Conjunctive Normal Form (CNF) in representing the QBF formula. Although CNF has worked well for SAT solvers, recent work has pointed out some inherent problems with using CNF in QBF solvers. In this paper, we describe a QBF solver, call...

Cellulose nanofibril (CNF) aerogels with grafted beta-cyclodextrin (β-CD) were prepared for the adsorption of phenol pollutants from water. Compared with regular wood fibers, CNF aerogel not only can immobilize more β-CDs, but also it provides higher porosity and a larger specific surface area for phenol absorption. The CNF-CD aerogel becomes mechanically robust through chemical crosslinking. I...

We studied the direct electron transfer (DET) of proteins on a carbon nanofiber (CNF) modified carbon film electrode by employing the one-step UV/ozone treatment of CNF. This treatment changed the CNF surface from hydrophobic to hydrophilic because a sufficient quantity of oxygen functional groups was introduced onto the CNF surface. Furthermore, this simple approach increased both the effectiv...

Acupuncture modulation of activity in the human brainstem is not well known. This structure is plagued by physiological artifact in neuroimaging experiments. In addition, most studies have used short (<15 min) block designs, which miss delayed responses following longer duration stimulation. We used brainstem-focused cardiac-gated fMRI and evaluated time-variant brain response to longer duratio...

Placebo-induced expectancies have been shown to decrease pain in a manner reversible by opioid antagonists, but little is known about the central brain mechanisms of opioid release during placebo treatment. This study examined placebo effects in pain by using positron-emission tomography with [11C]carfentanil, which measures regional -opioid receptor availability in vivo. Noxious thermal stimul...

Cellulose nanofi brils (CNF), also known as nanofi brillar cellulose (NFC), are an advanced biomaterial made mainly from renewable forest and agricultural resources that have demonstrated exceptional performance in composites. In addition, they have been utilized in barrier coatings, food, transparent fl exible fi lms and other applications. Research on CNF has advanced rapidly over the last de...

The interlaminar shear response is studied for carbon nanofiber (CNF) modified out-of-autoclave-vacuum-bag-only (OOA-VBO) carbon fiber reinforced plastic (CFRP). Commercial OOA-VBO prepregs were coated with a CNF modified epoxy solution and a control epoxy solution without CNF to make CNF modified samples and control samples, respectively. Tensile testing was used to study the in-plane shear pe...

For a CNF formula F we define its 1-conflict graph as follows: Two clauses C,D ∈ F are connected by an edge if they have a nontrivial resolvent – that is, if there is a unique literal u ∈ C for which ū ∈ D. Let lc1(F ) denote the maximum degree of this graph. A k-CNF formula is a CNF formula in which each clause has exactly k distinct literals. We show that (1) a k-CNF formula F with lc1(F ) ≤ ...

Abstract Background Freezing of gait (FOG) is a particularly debilitating motor deficit seen in subset Parkinson’s disease (PD) patients that poorly responsive to standard levodopa therapy or deep brain stimulation (DBS) established PD targets such as the subthalamic nucleus and globus pallidus interna. The proposal DBS target midbrain, known pedunculopontine (PPN) address FOG, was based on its...