In this paper, the ethical and legal issues raised by the deactivation of implantable cardioverter-defibrillators (ICDs) in patients with terminal cancer is considered. It is argued that the ICD cannot be well described either as a treatment or as a non-treatment option, and thus raises complex questions regarding how rules governing deactivation should be framed. A new category called "integra...

This paper studies oxidation catalytic converters that were vehicle-aged in a diesel automobile. The deposition of several atoms (S, P, C, Si, Ca, Zn and Fe) was detected by several chemical analysis techniques. Moreover, AlPO4 and Al2(SO4)3 were identified by XRD. The catalytic performance of the aged catalysts with different mileages showed a similar degree of deactivation for CO and C3H6 oxi...

The effect of nicotine on the major human neuronal nicotinic receptor (alpha 4 beta 2 subtype) was studied in permanently transfected HEK 293 cells. Prolonged exposure to low concentrations of nicotine (1 microM) increased epibatidine binding but functionally deactivated the nicotinic receptor, abolishing Ca2+ influx in response to an acute nicotine challenge. Deactivation could also be caused ...

The neural underpinnings of age-related memory impairment remain to be fully elucidated. Using a subsequent memory face-name functional MRI (fMRI) paradigm, young and old adults showed a similar magnitude and extent of hippocampal activation during successful associative encoding. Young adults demonstrated greater deactivation (task-induced decrease in BOLD signal) in medial parietal regions du...

Although the contributions of primary auditory cortex (AI) to sound localization have been extensively studied in a large number of mammals, little is known of the contributions of nonprimary auditory cortex to sound localization. Therefore the purpose of this study was to examine the contributions of both primary and all the recognized regions of acoustically responsive nonprimary auditory cor...

The boron-oxygen recombination center responsible for the light-induced degradation of Czochralski silicon solar cells can be permanently deactivated by illumination at elevated temperature. In this study, we examine the impact of dopant compensation on the deactivation process. The experimental results show that the deactivation rate depends inversely on the total boron concentration instead o...

Deactivation of N-methyl-D-aspartate (NMDA) channels after brief agonist exposure determines the duration of their synaptic activation during excitatory neurotransmission. We performed patch-clamp recordings of L-glutamate responses from human embryonic kidney tumoral cells (HEK293) expressing NR1 subunit variants lacking exon 5 together with the NR2B subunit. These responses had deactivation c...