On Modeling the Response of Synovial Fluid: Unsteady Flow of a Shear-Thinning, Chemically-Reacting Fluid Mixture

We study the flow of a shear-thinning, chemically-reacting fluid that could be used to model the flow of the synovial fluid. The actual geometry where the flow of the synovial fluid takes place is very complicated, and therefore the governing equations are not amenable to simple mathematical analysis. In order to understand the response of the model, we choose to study the flow in a simple geometry. While the flow domain is not a geometry relevant to the flow of the synovial fluid in the human body it yet provides a flow which can be used to assess the efficacy of different models that have been proposed to describe synovial fluids. We study the flow in the annular region between two cylinders, one of which is undergoing unsteady oscillations about their common axis, in order to understand the quintessential behavioral characteristics of the synovial fluid. We use the three models suggested by Hron et al. [ J. Hron, J. M\'{a}lek, P. Pust\v{e}jovsk\'{a}, K. R. Rajagopal, On concentration dependent shear-thinning behavior in modeling of synovial fluid flow, Adv. in Tribol. (In Press).] to study the problem, by appealing to a semi-inverse method. The assumed structure for the velocity field automatically satisfies the constraint of incompressibility, and the balance of linear momentum is solved together with a convection-diffusion equation. The results are compared to those associated with the Newtonian model. We also study the case in which an external pressure gradient is applied along the axis of the cylindrical annulus.Comment: 25 pages, 11 figures, accepted in Computers & Applications with Mathematic

Modulational instability of two pairs of counter-propagating waves and energy exchange in two-component media

The dynamics of two pairs of counter-propagating waves in two-component media is considered within the framework of two generally nonintegrable coupled Sine-Gordon equations. We consider the dynamics of weakly nonlinear wave packets, and using an asymptotic multiple-scales expansion we obtain a suite of evolution equations to describe energy exchange between the two components of the system. Depending on the wave packet length-scale vis-a-vis the wave amplitude scale, these evolution equations are either four non-dispersive and nonlinearly coupled envelope equations, or four non-locally coupled nonlinear Schroedinger equations. We also consider a set of fully coupled nonlinear Schroedinger equations, even though this system contains small dispersive terms which are strictly beyond the leading order of the asymptotic multiple-scales expansion method. Using both the theoretical predictions following from these asymptotic models and numerical simulations of the original unapproximated equations, we investigate the stability of plane-wave solutions, and show that they may be modulationally unstable. These instabilities can then lead to the formation of localized structures, and to a modification of the energy exchange between the components. When the system is close to being integrable, the time-evolution is distinguished by a remarkable almost periodic sequence of energy exchange scenarios, with spatial patterns alternating between approximately uniform wavetrains and localized structures.Comment: 35 pages, 13 figure

The effect of the annealing temperature on the local distortion of La0.67_{0.67}Ca0.33_{0.33}MnO3_3 thin films

Mn $K$-edge fluorescence data are presented for thin film samples (3000~\AA) of Colossal Magnetoresistive (CMR) La$_{0.67}$Ca$_{0.33}$MnO$_3$: as-deposited, and post-annealed at 1000 K and 1200 K. The local distortion is analyzed in terms of three contributions: static, phonon, and an extra, temperature-dependent, polaron term. The polaron distortion is very small for the as-deposited sample and increases with the annealing temperature. In contrast, the static distortion in the samples decreases with the annealing temperature. Although the local structure of the as-deposited sample shows very little temperature dependence, the change in resistivity with temperature is the largest of these three thin film samples. The as-deposited sample also has the highest magnetoresistance (MR), which indicates some other mechanism may also contribute to the transport properties of CMR samples. We also discuss the relationship between local distortion and the magnetization of the sample.Comment: 11 pages of Preprint format, 8 figures in one tar fil

Periodic Travelling Waves in Dimer Granular Chains

We study bifurcations of periodic travelling waves in granular dimer chains from the anti-continuum limit, when the mass ratio between the light and heavy beads is zero. We show that every limiting periodic wave is uniquely continued with respect to the mass ratio parameter and the periodic waves with the wavelength larger than a certain critical value are spectrally stable. Numerical computations are developed to study how this solution family is continued to the limit of equal mass ratio between the beads, where periodic travelling waves of granular monomer chains exist

Antioxidant therapeutic advances in COPD

Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) is associated with a high incidence of morbidity and mortality. Cigarette smoke-induced oxidative stress is intimately associated with the progression and exacerbation of COPD and therefore targeting oxidative stress with antioxidants or boosting the endogenous levels of antioxidants is likely to have beneficial outcome in the treatment of COPD. Among the various antioxidants tried so far, thiol antioxidants and mucolytic agents, such as glutathione, N-acetyl-L-cysteine, N-acystelyn, erdosteine, fudosteine and carbocysteine; Nrf2 activators; and dietary polyphenols (curcumin, resveratrol, and green tea catechins/quercetin) have been reported to increase intracellular thiol status along with induction of GSH biosynthesis. Such an elevation in the thiol status in turn leads to detoxification of free radicals and oxidants as well as inhibition of ongoing inflammatory responses. In addition, specific spin traps, such as α-phenyl-N-tert-butyl nitrone, a catalytic antioxidant (ECSOD mimetic), porphyrins (AEOL 10150 and AEOL 10113), and a SOD mimetic M40419 have also been reported to inhibit cigarette smoke-induced inflammatory responses in vivo in the lung. Since a variety of oxidants, free radicals and aldehydes are implicated in the pathogenesis of COPD, it is possible that therapeutic administration of multiple antioxidants and mucolytics will be effective in management of COPD. However, a successful outcome will critically depend upon the choice of antioxidant therapy for a particular clinical phenotype of COPD, whose pathophysiology should be first properly understood. This article will review the various approaches adopted to enhance lung antioxidant levels, antioxidant therapeutic advances and recent past clinical trials of antioxidant compounds in COPD

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe