Death due to ingestion of nicotine-containing solution: Case report and review of the literature

Nicotine, a lipid-soluble alkaloid obtained from the dried leaves of Nicotiana, is most frequently encountered in tobacco products for smoking, chewing or sniffing as well as in a limited number of pesticides. Though nicotine is one of the most toxic drugs of abuse, it has rarely led to fatalities. Sudden death can be caused by cardiovascular arrest, respiratory muscle paralysis and/or central respiratory failure. A 42-year-old man was found dead by his wife. He was lying on the floor, next to a box containing many empty bottles of beer and vodka. Some labeled chemical bottles found at the scene contained various substances, including nicotine and brucine. Gross examination of the organs at autopsy revealed no specific findings. The toxicological examination failed to disclose any lethal toxic agents other than a high concentration of nicotine and its primary metabolite cotinine in femoral venous blood (2.2 μg/mL). Blood alcohol was determined to be 2.1 g/L in femoral venous blood. Only a paucity of fatal cases of nicotine poisoning has been reported in the literature so far. © 2009 Elsevier Ireland Ltd. All rights reserved

Проблемы теневой экономики в Украине

Brain inflammation plays a central role in multiple sclerosis (MS). Besides lymphocytes, the astroglia and microglia mainly contribute to the cellular composition of the inflammatory infiltrate in MS lesions. Several studies were able to demonstrate that cortical lesions are characterized by lower levels of inflammatory cells among activated microglia/macrophages. The underlying mechanisms for this difference, however, remain to be clarified. In the current study, we compared the kinetics and extent of microglia and astrocyte activation during early and late cuprizone-induced demyelination in the white matter tract corpus callosum and the telencephalic gray matter. Cellular parameters were related to the expression profiles of the chemokines Ccl2 and Ccl3. We are clearly able to demonstrate that both regions are characterized by early oligodendrocyte stress/apoptosis with concomitant microglia activation and delayed astrocytosis. The extent of microgliosis/astrocytosis appeared to be greater in the subcortical white matter tract corpus callosum compared to the gray matter cortex region. The same holds true for the expression of the key chemokines Ccl2 and Ccl3. The current study defines a model to study early microglia activation and to investigate differences in the neuroinflammatory response of white vs. gray matter

The arctic seasonal cycle of total column CO2 and CH4 from ground-based solar and lunar FTIR absorption spectrometry

Solar absorption spectroscopy in the near infrared has been performed in Ny-Ålesund (78.9° N, 11.9° E) since 2002; however, due to the high latitude of the site, the sun is below the horizon from October to March (polar night) and no solar absorption measurements are possible. Here we present a novel method of retrieving the total column dry-air mole fractions (DMFs) of CO2 and CH4 using moonlight in winter. Measurements have been taken during the polar nights from 2012 to 2016 and are validated with TCCON (Total Carbon Column Observing Network) measurements by solar and lunar absorption measurements on consecutive days and nights during spring and autumn. The complete seasonal cycle of the DMFs of CO2 and CH4 is presented and a precision of up to 0.5 % is achieved. A comparison of solar and lunar measurements on consecutive days during day and night in March 2013 yields non-significant biases of 0. 66 ± 4. 56 ppm for xCO2 and −1. 94 ± 20. 63 ppb for xCH4. Additionally a model comparison has been performed with data from various reanalysis models

Compellingly high SARS-CoV-2 susceptibility of Golden Syrian hamsters suggests multiple zoonotic infections of pet hamsters during the COVID-19 pandemic

Golden Syrian hamsters (Mesocricetus auratus) are used as a research model for severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus type 2 (SARS-CoV-2). Millions of Golden Syrian hamsters are also kept as pets in close contact to humans. To determine the minimum infective dose (MID) for assessing the zoonotic transmission risk, and to define the optimal infection dose for experimental studies, we orotracheally inoculated hamsters with SARS-CoV-2 doses from 1 * 105 to 1 * 10-4 tissue culture infectious dose 50 (TCID50). Body weight and virus shedding were monitored daily. 1 * 10-3 TCID50 was defined as the MID, and this was still sufficient to induce virus shedding at levels up to 102.75 TCID50/ml, equaling the estimated MID for humans. Virological and histological data revealed 1 * 102 TCID50 as the optimal dose for experimental infections. This compelling high susceptibility leading to productive infections in Golden Syrian hamsters must be considered as a potential source of SARS-CoV-2 infection for humans that come into close contact with pet hamsters

Physics at a 100 TeV pp collider: beyond the Standard Model phenomena

This report summarises the physics opportunities in the search and study of physics beyond the Standard Model at a 100 TeV pp collider.Comment: 196 pages, 114 figures. Chapter 3 of the "Physics at the FCC-hh" Repor

Pregnant women with bronchial asthma benefit from progressive muscle relaxation: A randomized, prospective, controlled trial

Background: Asthma is a serious medical problem in pregnancy and is often associated with stress, anger and poor quality of life. The aim of this study was to determine the efficacy of progressive muscle relaxation (PMR) on change in blood pressure, lung parameters, heart rate, anger and health-related quality of life in pregnant women with bronchial asthma. Methods: We treated a sample of 64 pregnant women with bronchial asthma from the local population in an 8-week randomized, prospective, controlled trial. Thirty-two were selected for PMR, and 32 received a placebo intervention. The systolic blood pressure, forced expiratory volume in the first second, peak expiratory flow and heart rate were tested, and the State-Trait Anger Expression Inventory and Health Survey (SF-36) were employed. Results: According to the intend-to-treat principle, a significant reduction in systolic blood pressure and a significant increase in both forced expiratory volume in the first second and peak expiratory flow were observed after PMR. The heart rate showed a significant increase in the coefficient of variation, root mean square of successive differences and high frequency ranges, in addition to a significant reduction in low and middle frequency ranges. A significant reduction on three of five State-Trait Anger Expression Inventory scales, and a significant increase on seven of eight SF-36 scales were observed. Conclusions: PMR appears to be an effective method to improve blood pressure, lung parameters and heart rate, and to decrease anger levels, thus enhancing health-related quality of life in pregnant women with bronchial asthma. Copyright (c) 2006 S. Karger AG, Basel

Consciousness, Action Selection, Meaning and Phenomenic Anticipation

Phenomenal states are generally considered the ultimate sources of intrinsic motivation for autonomous biological agents. In this article, we will address the issue of the necessity of exploiting these states for the design and implementation of robust goal-directed artificial systems. We will provide an analysis of consciousness in terms of a precise definition of how an agent "understands" the informational flows entering the agent and its very own action possibilities. This abstract model of consciousness and understanding will be based in the analysis and evaluation of phenomenal states along potential future trajectories in the state space of the agents. This implies that a potential strategy to follow in order to build autonomous but still customer-useful systems is to embed them with the particular, ad hoc phenomenality that captures the system-external requirements that define the system usefulness from a customer-based, requirements-strict engineering viewpoint

Optimizing decomposition of software architecture for local recovery

Cataloged from PDF version of article.The increasing size and complexity of software systems has led to an amplified number of potential failures and as such makes it harder to ensure software reliability. Since it is usually hard to prevent all the failures, fault tolerance techniques have become more important. An essential element of fault tolerance is the recovery from failures. Local recovery is an effective approach whereby only the erroneous parts of the system are recovered while the other parts remain available. For achieving local recovery, the architecture needs to be decomposed into separate units that can be recovered in isolation. Usually, there are many different alternative ways to decompose the system into recoverable units. It appears that each of these decomposition alternatives performs differently with respect to availability and performance metrics. We propose a systematic approach dedicated to optimizing the decomposition of software architecture for local recovery. The approach provides systematic guidelines to depict the design space of the possible decomposition alternatives, to reduce the design space with respect to domain and stakeholder constraints and to balance the feasible alternatives with respect to availability and performance. The approach is supported by an integrated set of tools and illustrated for the open-source MPlayer software