In the present study, we examined the effect of interleukin-2 (IL-2) on cardiomyocyte Ca(2+) handling. The effects of steady-state and transient changes in stimulation frequency on the intracellular Ca(2+) transient were investigated in isolated ventricular myocytes by spectrofluorometry. In the steady state (0.2 Hz) IL-2 (200 U/ml) decreased the amplitude of Ca(2+) transients induced by electr...

PURPOSE To determine the retinal function in early age-related macular degeneration (AMD) assessed by the multifocal electroretinogram (mfERG) and flicker perimetry and to seek a relationship between local objective mfERG parameters and subjective flicker perimetry thresholds. METHODS mfERG and flicker perimetry were performed in 15 patients (15 eyes) with early AMD and 14 controls (14 eyes) ...

Histrionicotoxin, a toxin isolated from skin secretions of a Colombian arrow poison frog, Dendrobates histrionicus, decreased the amplitude and time-course of the endplate current, and altered the voltage dependence of the half-decay time. In addition, the toxin produced a characteristic nonlinearity in the current-voltage relationship of the endplate current when 3-s voltage conditioning steps...

Single top quark production at hadron colliders allows a direct measurement of the top quark charged current coupling. We present the complete tree-level helicity amplitudes for four processes involving the production and semileptonic decay of a single top quark: W -gluon fusion, flavor excitation, s-channel production and W associated production. For the first three processes we study the qual...

The Weyl–van-der-Waerden spinor technique for calculating helicity amplitudes of massive and massless particles is presented in a form that is particularly well suited to a direct implementation in computer algebra. Moreover, we explain how to exploit discrete symmetries and how to avoid unphysical poles in amplitudes in practice. The efficiency of the formalism is demonstrated by giving explic...

The Higgs couplings to matter fields are proportional to their masses. Thus Higgs amplitudes can be obtained by differentiating amplitudes without Higgs with respect to masses. We show how this well-known statement can be extended to higher order when renormalization effects are taken into account. We establish the connection with the Callan-Symanzik and renormalization group equations and cons...

Humans perform visual search fairly efficiently, finding targets within only a few fixations. Data from eye-tracked participants was subjected to a fixation by fixation analysis to pinpoint why participants tended to make fewer fixations than would be expected by chance. The goal of this paper is to present a computational model that performs visual search as efficiently as humans. The model va...

A general continuum-RPA approach is developed to describe electromagnetic transitions between giant resonances. Using a diagrammatic representation for the three-point Green’s function, an expression for the transition amplitude is derived which allows one to incorporate effects of mixing of single and double giant resonances as well as to take the entire basis of particle-hole states into cons...

OBJECTIVE Vestibulo-ocular reflex (VOR) gain is well-suited for identifying rotational vestibular dysfunction, but may miss partial progressive decline in age-related vestibular function. Since compensatory saccades might provide an alternative method for identifying subtle vestibular decline, we describe the relationship between VOR gain and compensatory saccades in healthy older adults. MET...