Tablets from the Sippar Library, XIII. Enuma Anu Ellil XX

The Sippar Library tablet IM 124485 is a new source for Tablet XX ofEnūma Anu Ellil (EAE), the great compilation of Babylonian celestial and meteorological omens. The twentieth tablet of the series, which deals principally with lunar eclipses on the fourteenth day of each month of the year, was edited by Francesca Rochberg in 1988 along with all the other tablets of lunar-eclipse omens inEAE(Rochberg-Halton 1988: Chapter 10). Rochberg was unable to report the whole text of her MS M = ND 4357, a Neo-Assyrian tablet from the library of the temple of Nabû at Kalaḫ; it can now be consulted asCTNIV 5 (Wiseman and Black 1996: Pls. 5–6, 145), though the copy of the reverse is inadequate. In addition a Late Babylonian exemplar of a further commentary, written in the time of Philip Arrhidaeus for the scholar Iqīša of Uruk, has come to light in W23300 (now IM 75990), published asUrukIV 162 (von Weiher 1993: 103–5, 186). Despite these additions to knowledge, some of the text ofEAEXX remained poorly enough preserved to make the discovery of a new manuscript very welcome.The new tablet allows seven sections of the text ofEAEXX to be reconstructed in full, and our understanding of the technical terminology refined as a consequence. The chief interest of this tablet ofEAEemerges more clearly than before. The common denominator of the twelve lunar-eclipse omens ofEAEXX is eclipses that, at least notionally, set in “above” and clear “below”, as observed in 1. 66 of the tablet published here. However, the observed phenomena that especially distinguish the protases ofEAEXX from those of other calendrical lunar-eclipse tablets appear to be particular to partial eclipses. The progress of the eclipse to a point at which the disk is half eclipsed (imšul) or more (eli mašāli illik) is explicitly recorded on six occasions (§§1.2, IV, V, VII, VIII, IX). The portents relate either to the moon's “emblem” (šurinnu), a term that signifies the moon in eclipse (§§1.1, IV), to its “horns” (qarnu), i.e. the cusps of the partially eclipsed disk (§§VIII, IX, X, XI, XII), or to both (§§V, VII). It seems that what the compiler ofEAEXX considered most portentous were the appearance, behaviour and other aspects of the lunar disk while the moon was half, or more than half, eclipsed.</jats:p

Tablets from the Sippar Library, VI. Atra-hasis

The Babylonian myth known to the ancients as Enūma ilū awëlum, “When the Gods Were Man”, and to modern scholarship as the Epic of Atra-ḫasīs, tells the wondrous story of the creation of mankind, of the attempts of the king of the gods, Enlil, to reduce the overpopulation that resulted from its unchecked reproduction — by plague, drought, famine and, most disastrously, the Deluge — and of the measures then taken by the gods to keep mankind's future numbers in check. Since its reconstruction some twenty-five years ago, by W. G. Lambert and A. R. Millard, there have come to light very few new sources for this composition. Several small additional fragments have been published by Lambert, and a further piece by Groneberg and Durand. The most significant discovery of new text has been the several tablets that were found in the library excavated by the late Dr Walid Al-Jadir of the University of Baghdad in the Neo-Babylonian temple of Šamaš at Sippar. This find led to a preliminary report in this journal that “there are tablets 1, 2, 3 and one other of the Standard Babylonian recension (as it must now be called) of Atra-hasis”.</jats:p

High Sensitivity pH Sensor Based on Porous Silicon (PSi) Extended Gate Field-Effect Transistor

In this study, porous silicon (PSi) was prepared and tested as an extended gate field-effect transistor (EGFET) for pH sensing. The prepared PSi has pore sizes in the range of 500 to 750 nm with a depth of approximately 42 �m. The results of testing PSi for hydrogen ion sensing in different pH buffer solutions reveal that the PSi has a sensitivity value of 66 mV/pH that is considered a super Nernstian value. The sensor considers stability to be in the pH range of 2 to 12. The hysteresis values of the prepared PSi sensor were approximately 8.2 and 10.5 mV in the low and high pH loop, respectively. The result of this study reveals a promising application of PSi in the field for detecting hydrogen ions in different solutions

Fast Retinal Vessel Detection and Measurement Using Wavelets and Edge Location Refinement

The relationship between changes in retinal vessel morphology and the onset and progression of diseases such as diabetes, hypertension and retinopathy of prematurity (ROP) has been the subject of several large scale clinical studies. However, the difficulty of quantifying changes in retinal vessels in a sufficiently fast, accurate and repeatable manner has restricted the application of the insights gleaned from these studies to clinical practice. This paper presents a novel algorithm for the efficient detection and measurement of retinal vessels, which is general enough that it can be applied to both low and high resolution fundus photographs and fluorescein angiograms upon the adjustment of only a few intuitive parameters. Firstly, we describe the simple vessel segmentation strategy, formulated in the language of wavelets, that is used for fast vessel detection. When validated using a publicly available database of retinal images, this segmentation achieves a true positive rate of 70.27%, false positive rate of 2.83%, and accuracy score of 0.9371. Vessel edges are then more precisely localised using image profiles computed perpendicularly across a spline fit of each detected vessel centreline, so that both local and global changes in vessel diameter can be readily quantified. Using a second image database, we show that the diameters output by our algorithm display good agreement with the manual measurements made by three independent observers. We conclude that the improved speed and generality offered by our algorithm are achieved without sacrificing accuracy. The algorithm is implemented in MATLAB along with a graphical user interface, and we have made the source code freely available

Activated leukocyte cell adhesion molecule in breast cancer: prognostic indicator

INTRODUCTION: Activated leukocyte cell adhesion molecule (ALCAM) (CD166) is an immunoglobulin molecule that has been implicated in cell migration. The present study examined the expression of ALCAM in human breast cancer and assessed its prognostic value. METHODS: The immunohistochemical distribution and location of ALCAM was assessed in normal breast tissue and carcinoma. The levels of ALCAM transcripts in frozen tissue (normal breast, n = 32; breast cancer, n = 120) were determined using real-time quantitative PCR. The results were then analyzed in relation to clinical data including the tumor type, the grade, the nodal involvement, distant metastases, the tumor, node, metastasis (TNM) stage, the Nottingham Prognostic Index (NPI), and survival over a 6-year follow-up period. RESULTS: Immunohistochemical staining on tissue sections in ducts/acini in normal breast and in breast carcinoma was ALCAM-positive. Differences in the number of ALCAM transcripts were found in different types of breast cancer. The level of ALCAM transcripts was lower (P = 0.05) in tumors from patients who had metastases to regional lymph nodes compared with those patients without, in higher grade tumors compared with Grade 1 tumors (P < 0.01), and in TNM Stage 3 tumors compared with TNM Stage 1 tumors (P < 0.01). Tumors from patients with poor prognosis (with NPI > 5.4) had significantly lower levels (P = 0.014) of ALCAM transcripts compared with patients with good prognosis (with NPI < 3.4), and tumors from patients with local recurrence had significantly lower levels than those patients without local recurrence or metastases (P = 0.04). Notably, tumors from patients who died of breast cancer had significantly lower levels of ALCAM transcripts (P = 0.0041) than those with primary tumors but no metastatic disease or local recurrence. Patients with low levels of ALCAM transcripts had significantly (P = 0.009) more incidents (metastasis, recurrence, death) compared with patients with primary breast tumors with high levels of ALCAM transcripts. CONCLUSIONS: In the present panel of breast cancer specimens, decreased levels of ALCAM correlated with the nodal involvement, the grade, the TNM stage, the NPI, and the clinical outcome (local recurrence and death). The data suggest that decreased ALCAM expression is of clinical significance in breast cancer, and that reduced expression indicates a more aggressive phenotype and poor prognosis

Altered regulation of Prox1-gene-expression in liver tumors

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