Telomere shortening may reflect the total number of divisions experienced by a somatic cell and is associated with replicative senescence. We found that the average rate of telomere shortening in peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBMCs) obtained longitudinally from nine different infants during the first 3 years of life (270 bp per year) is more than fourfold higher than in adults and does no...

Channel shortening is often necessary for demodulation of multicarrier signals, complexity reduction of maximum likelihood sequence estimation (MLSE), and can be used to suppress interference in multiuser detection. The Maximum Shortening SNR (MSSNR) and Minimum Mean Squared Error (MMSE) designs for channel shortening are popular in the literature due to their ease of implementation and near-op...

A Covering Array (CA), denoted by CA(N ; t, k, v), is a matrix of size N×k with entries from the set {0, 1, 2, ..., v−1}, where in each submatrix of size N×t appears each combination of symbols derived from v, at least once. The Covering Arrays (CAs) are combinatorial structures that have applications in software testing. This paper defines the Problem of Optimal Shortening of Covering ARrays (...

Suction-feeding fishes capture food by fast and forceful expansion of the mouth cavity, and axial muscles probably provide substantial power for this feeding behavior. Dorsal expansion of the mouth cavity can only be powered by the epaxial muscles, but both the sternohyoid, shortening against an immobile pectoral girdle to retract the hyoid, and the hypaxial muscles, shortening to retract both ...

A mathematical model was analyzed to obtain a quantitative and testable representation of the long-standing hypothesis that the respiratory muscles drive the chest wall along the trajectory for which the work of breathing is minimal. The respiratory system was modeled as a linear elastic system that can be expanded either by pressure applied at the airway opening (passive inflation) or by activ...