Brief fluctuations in dopamine concentration (dopamine transients) play a key role in behavior towards rewards, including drugs of abuse. Drug-evoked dopamine transients may result from actions at both dopamine cell bodies and dopamine terminals. Inhibitory opsins can be targeted to dopamine neurons permitting their firing activity to be suppressed. However, as dopamine transients can become un...

Spontaneous calcium oscillations in mushroom bodies of late stage pupal and adult Drosophila brains have been implicated in memory consolidation during olfactory associative learning. This study explores the cellular mechanisms regulating calcium dynamics in Kenyon cells, principal neurons in mushroom bodies. Fura-2 imaging shows that Kenyon cells cultured from late stage Drosophila pupae gener...

We carried out a series of experiment demonstrating the role of mitochondria in the cytosolic and mitochondrial Ca(2+) transients and compared the results with those from computer simulation. In rat ventricular myocytes, increasing the rate of stimulation (1~3 Hz) made both the diastolic and systolic [Ca(2+)] bigger in mitochondria as well as in cytosol. As L-type Ca(2+) channel has key influen...

Numerous signals arising from physiological and physical processes, in addition to being non-stationary, are moreover a mixture of sustained oscillations and non-oscillatory transients that are difficult to disentangle by linear methods. Examples of such signals include speech, biomedical, and geophysical signals. Therefore, this paper describes a new nonlinear signal analysis method based on s...

Conclusions of epidemiological studies describing adverse health effects as a result of exposure to electromagnetic fields are not unanimous and often contradictory. It has been proposed that an explanation could be that high-frequency voltage transients [dirty electricity (DE)] which are superimposed on 50/60-Hz fields, but are generally not measured, are the real causal agent. DE has been lin...

Ca2+ signals in cardiac muscle cells are composed of spatially limited elementary events termed Ca2+ sparks. Several studies have also indicated that Ca2+ signals smaller than Ca2+ sparks can be elicited. These signals have been termed Ca2+ quarks and were proposed to result from the opening of a single Ca2+ release channel of the sarcoplasmic reticulum. We used laser-scanning confocal microsco...

Transient Signal Analysis is a digital device testing method that is based on the analysis of voltage transients at multiple test points and on I DD switching transients on the supply rails. We show that it is possible to identify defective devices by analyzing the transient signals produced at test points on paths not sensitized from the defect site. The small signal variations produced at the...