1,658 research outputs found
Modulation of Human Muscle Spindle Discharge by Arterial Pulsations - Functional Effects and Consequences
Arterial pulsations are known to modulate muscle spindle firing; however, the physiological significance of such synchronised modulation has not been investigated. Unitary recordings were made from 75 human muscle spindle afferents innervating the pretibial muscles. The modulation of muscle spindle discharge by arterial pulsations was evaluated by R-wave triggered averaging and power spectral analysis. We describe various effects arterial pulsations may have on muscle spindle afferent discharge. Afferents could be âdrivenâ by arterial pulsations, e.g., showing no other spontaneous activity than spikes generated with cardiac rhythmicity. Among afferents showing ongoing discharge that was not primarily related to cardiac rhythmicity we illustrate several mechanisms by which individual spikes may become phase-locked. However, in the majority of afferents the discharge rate was modulated by the pulse wave without spikes being phase locked. Then we assessed whether these influences changed in two physiological conditions in which a sustained increase in muscle sympathetic nerve activity was observed without activation of fusimotor neurones: a maximal inspiratory breath-hold, which causes a fall in systolic pressure, and acute muscle pain, which causes an increase in systolic pressure. The majority of primary muscle spindle afferents displayed pulse-wave modulation, but neither apnoea nor pain had any significant effect on the strength of this modulation, suggesting that the physiological noise injected by the arterial pulsations is robust and relatively insensitive to fluctuations in blood pressure. Within the afferent population there was a similar number of muscle spindles that were inhibited and that were excited by the arterial pulse wave, indicating that after signal integration at the population level, arterial pulsations of opposite polarity would cancel each other out. We speculate that with close-to-threshold stimuli the arterial pulsations may serve as an endogenous noise source that may synchronise the sporadic discharge within the afferent population and thus facilitate the detection of weak stimuli
More on general -brane solutions
Recently it was found that the complete integration of the
Einstein-dilaton-antisymmetric form equations depending on one variable and
describing static singly charged -branes leads to two and only two classes
of solutions: the standard asymptotically flat black -brane and the
asymptotically non-flat -brane approaching the linear dilaton background at
spatial infinity. Here we analyze this issue in more details and generalize the
corresponding uniqueness argument to the case of partially delocalized branes.
We also consider the special case of codimension one and find, in addition to
the standard domain wall, the black wall solution. Explicit relations between
our solutions and some recently found -brane solutions ``with extra
parameters'' are presented.Comment: 29 pages, 2 figure
Immune mechanisms of vaccine induced protection against chronic hepatitis C virus infection in chimpanzees
Hepatitis C virus (HCV) infection is characterized by a high propensity for development of life-long viral persistence. An estimated 170 million people suffer from chronic hepatitis caused by HCV. Currently, there is no approved prophylactic HCV vaccine available. With the near disappearance of the most relevant animal model for HCV, the chimpanzee, we review the progression that has been made regarding prophylactic vaccine development against HCV. We describe the results of the individual vaccine evaluation experiments in chimpanzees, in relation to what has been observed in humans. The results of the different studies indicate that partial protection against infection can be achieved, but a clear correlate of protection has thus far not yet been defined
Hydrodynamics from the Dp-brane
We complete the computation of viscous transport coefficients in the near
horizon geometries that arise from a stack of black Dp-branes for p=2,...,6 in
the decoupling limit. The main new result is the obtention of the bulk
viscosity which, for all p, is found to be related to the speed of sound by the
simple relation \zeta/\eta = -2(v_s^2-1/p). For completeness the shear
viscosity is rederived from gravitational perturbations in the shear and scalar
channels. We comment on technical issues like the counterterms needed, or the
possible dependence on the conformal frame.Comment: 15 page
The Conformal Penrose Limit and the Resolution of the pp-curvature Singularities
We consider the exact solutions of the supergravity theories in various
dimensions in which the space-time has the form M_{d} x S^{D-d} where M_{d} is
an Einstein space admitting a conformal Killing vector and S^{D-d} is a sphere
of an appropriate dimension. We show that, if the cosmological constant of
M_{d} is negative and the conformal Killing vector is space-like, then such
solutions will have a conformal Penrose limit: M^{(0)}_{d} x S^{D-d} where
M^{(0)}_{d} is a generalized d-dimensional AdS plane wave. We study the
properties of the limiting solutions and find that M^{(0)}_{d} has 1/4
supersymmetry as well as a Virasoro symmetry. We also describe how the
pp-curvature singularity of M^{(0)}_{d} is resolved in the particular case of
the D6-branes of D=10 type IIA supergravity theory. This distinguished case
provides an interesting generalization of the plane waves in D=11 supergravity
theory and suggests a duality between the SU(2) gauged d=8 supergravity of
Salam and Sezgin on M^{(0)}_{8} and the d=7 ungauged supergravity theory on its
pp-wave boundary.Comment: 20 pages, LaTeX; typos corrected, journal versio
Thermodynamic Curvature of the BTZ Black Hole
Some thermodynamic properties of the Ba\~nados-Teitelboim-Zanelli (BTZ) black
hole are studied to get the effective dimension of its corresponding
statistical model. For this purpose, we make use of the geometrical approach to
the thermodynamics: Considering the black hole as a thermodynamic system with
two thermodynamic variables (the mass and the angular momemtum ), we
obtain two-dimensional Riemannian thermodynamic geometry described by positive
definite Ruppeiner metric. From the thermodynamic curvature we find that the
extremal limit is the critical point. The effective spatial dimension of the
statistical system corresponding to the near-extremal BTZ black holes is one.
Far from the extremal point, the effective dimension becomes less than one,
which leads to one possible speculation on the underlying structure for the
corresponding statistical model.Comment: 19 pages, LaTeX with revtex macro, 4 figures in eps file
The effect of blanking of TDMA interference on radio-astronomical observations: experimental results
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