Nano-Communication for Biomedical Applications: A Review on the State-of-the-Art From Physical Layers to Novel Networking Concepts

We review EM modeling of the human body, which is essential for in vivo wireless communication channel characterization; discuss EM wave propagation through human tissues; present the choice of operational frequencies based on current standards and examine their effects on communication system performance; discuss the challenges of in vivo antenna design, as the antenna is generally considered to be an integral part of the in vivo channel; review the propagation models for the in vivo wireless communication channel and discuss the main differences relative to the ex vivo channel; and address several open research problems and future research directions

McNair Research Journal - Summer 2015

Journal articles based on research conducted by undergraduate students in the McNair Scholars Program Table of Contents Biography of Dr. Ronald E. McNair Statements: Dr. Neal J. Smatresk, UNLV President Dr. Juanita P. Fain, Vice President of Student Affairs Dr. William W. Sullivan, Associate Vice President for Retention and Outreach Mr. Keith Rogers, Deputy Executive Director of the Center for Academic Enrichment and Outreach McNair Scholars Institute Staf

Determining Signalling Nodes for Apoptosis by a Genetic High-Throughput Screen

With the ever-increasing information emerging from the various sequencing and gene annotation projects, there is an urgent need to elucidate the cellular functions of the newly discovered genes. The genetically regulated cell suicide of apoptosis is especially suitable for such endeavours as it is governed by a vast number of factors.We have set up a high-throughput screen in 96-well microtiter plates for genes that induce apoptosis upon their individual transfection into human cells. Upon screening approximately 100,000 cDNA clones we determined 74 genes that initiate this cellular suicide programme. A thorough bioinformatics analysis of these genes revealed that 91% are novel apoptosis regulators. Careful sequence analysis and functional annotation showed that the apoptosis factors exhibit a distinct functional distribution that distinguishes the cell death process from other signalling pathways. While only a minority of classic signal transducers were determined, a substantial number of the genes fall into the transporter- and enzyme-category. The apoptosis factors are distributed throughout all cellular organelles and many signalling circuits, but one distinct signalling pathway connects at least some of the isolated genes. Comparisons with microarray data suggest that several genes are dysregulated in specific types of cancers and degenerative diseases.Many unknown genes for cell death were revealed through our screen, supporting the enormous complexity of cell death regulation. Our results will serve as a repository for other researchers working with genomics data related to apoptosis or for those seeking to reveal novel signalling pathways for cell suicide

The societal context of professional practice: Examining the impact of politics and economics on journalistic role performance across 37 countries

The impact of socio-political variables on journalism is an ongoing concern of comparative research on media systems and professional cultures. However, they have rarely been studied systematically across diverse cases, particularly outside Western democracies, and existing studies that compare western and non-western contexts have mainly focused on journalistic role conceptions rather than actual journalistic practice. Using journalistic role performance as a theoretical and methodological framework, this paper overcomes these shortcomings through a content analysis of 148,474 news stories from 365 print, online, TV, and radio outlets in 37 countries. We consider two fundamental system-level variables—liberal democracy and market orientation—testing a series of hypotheses concerning their influence on the interventionist, watchdog, loyal-facilitator, service, infotainment, and civic roles in the news globally. Findings confirm the widely asserted hypothesis that liberal democracy is associated with the performance of public-service oriented roles. Claims that market orientation reinforces critical and civic-oriented journalism show more mixed results and give some support to the argument that there are forms of “market authoritarianism” associated with loyalist journalism. The findings also show that the interventionist and infotainment roles are not significantly associated with the standard measures of political and economic structure, suggesting the need for more research on their varying forms across societies and the kinds of system-level factors that might explain them

Solving The Subset Interconnection Design Problem Using Genetic Algorithms

The genetic algorithm (GA) heuristic is used to find near optimal solutions for an NP-complete variation of the minimum spanning tree problem. Given a set of vertices V , a cost function c:V \ThetaV \Gamma!! + , and a collection of subsets of V , fX 1 ; :::; Xmg, a graph G with vertex set V is called feasible if every X i induces a connected subgraph of G . The minimum subset interconnection design problem is to find a feasible graph with a minimum cost. A GA solution is compared to two recently developed approximate solution techniques, and is shown to produce superior results

Solving the three-star tree isomorphism problem using genetic algorithms

Genetic Algorithms (GA) are used to nd minimum cost trees with special structures. The desired structure for the trees is M-Star isomorphic, where M = 3. The M-Star isomorphic problem is to nd a spanning tree that is a star, and on each branch there are M vertices connected to form a path. The M-Star problem is NP-complete for M>2. The cost is taken as the sum of the length of the edges forming the spanning tree. The determinant encoding, the Davis encoding, and the Prufer encoding schemes are used to represent the spanning trees. The cost of a greedy algorithm is compared to the three GA encodings and a variety of crossover and mutation operators. Results show that the determinant encoding is better than the Prufer encoding, and is as good as the Davis encoding for the 19 vertex problem. For the 61 vertex problem the Davis encoding produces better results over the determinant encoding in 8 out of 10 test cases