Occlusion of acute distal brachial, proximal radial and ulnar arteries in a young thrower

SummaryAcute arterial occlusion, a rare condition in throwers, requires early detection and treatment for avoiding further complications. Thus far, no study has mentioned the occurrence of distal brachial, proximal radial, and ulnar artery occlusion in baseball players. An adolescent baseball pitcher presented with acute occlusion of the distal brachial, proximal radial, or ulnar artery. The patient complained of a cold sensation in the hand, wrist, and distal forearm. On physical examination, decreased surface skin temperature, and no radial pulse in the wrist suggested arterial occlusion. Emergency angiography validated the clinical suspicion, and identified the arteries and sites of vascular occlusion. Surgery was performed to alleviate the occlusions, thereby resolving the preoperative complaints and abnormal findings. Furthermore, postoperative magnetic resonance imaging of the shoulder and elbow joint was conducted to determine the causes of arterial occlusion. The patient resumed pitching 4 months postoperatively, and has remained active and symptom free. Magnetic resonance imaging examination revealed no vascular abnormalities or bony or soft tissue in the shoulder or elbow region. With early detection and treatment, a favorable prognosis can be achieved in baseball pitchers with acute upper extremity arterial occlusion so that their pitching career is not jeopardized

Financial regulation in Hong Kong: Time for a change

The global financial system experienced its first systemic crisis since the 1930s in autumn 2008, with the failure of major financial institutions in the United States and Europe and the seizure of global credit markets. Although Hong Kong was not at the epicentre of this crisis, it was nonetheless affected. Following an overview of Hong Kong's existing financial regulatory framework, the article discusses the global financial crisis and its impact in Hong Kong, as well as regulatory responses to date. From this basis, the article discusses recommendations for reforms in Hong Kong to address weaknesses highlighted by the crisis, focusing on issues relating to Lehman Brothers "Minibonds. " The article concludes by looking forward, recommending that the crisis be taken not only as the catalyst to resolve existing weaknesses but also to strengthen and enhance Hong Kong's role and competitiveness as China's premier international financial centre. Copyright © 2010 The Berkeley Electronic Press. All rights reserved.published_or_final_versio

Guided Time Warping for Motion Editing

Time warping allows users to modify timing without affecting poses. It has many applications in animation systems for motion editing, such as refining motions to meet new timing constraints or modifying the acting of animated characters. However, time warping typically requires many manual adjustments to achieve the desired results. We present a technique which simplifies this process by allowing time warps to be guided by a provided reference motion. Given few timing constraints, it computes a warp that both satisfies these constraints and maximizes local timing similarities to the reference. The algorithm is fast enough to incorporate into standard animation workflows. We apply the technique to two common tasks: preserving the natural timing of motions under new time constraints and modifying the timing of motions for stylistic effects.Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game La

miRTar: an integrated system for identifying miRNA-target interactions in human

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>MicroRNAs (miRNAs) are small non-coding RNA molecules that are ~22-nt-long sequences capable of suppressing protein synthesis. Previous research has suggested that miRNAs regulate 30% or more of the human protein-coding genes. The aim of this work is to consider various analyzing scenarios in the identification of miRNA-target interactions, as well as to provide an integrated system that will aid in facilitating investigation on the influence of miRNA targets by alternative splicing and the biological function of miRNAs in biological pathways.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>This work presents an integrated system, miRTar, which adopts various analyzing scenarios to identify putative miRNA target sites of the gene transcripts and elucidates the biological functions of miRNAs toward their targets in biological pathways. The system has three major features. First, the prediction system is able to consider various analyzing scenarios (1 miRNA:1 gene, 1:N, N:1, N:M, all miRNAs:N genes, and N miRNAs: genes involved in a pathway) to easily identify the regulatory relationships between interesting miRNAs and their targets, in 3'UTR, 5'UTR and coding regions. Second, miRTar can analyze and highlight a group of miRNA-regulated genes that participate in particular KEGG pathways to elucidate the biological roles of miRNAs in biological pathways. Third, miRTar can provide further information for elucidating the miRNA regulation, i.e., miRNA-target interactions, affected by alternative splicing.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>In this work, we developed an integrated resource, miRTar, to enable biologists to easily identify the biological functions and regulatory relationships between a group of known/putative miRNAs and protein coding genes. miRTar is now available at <url>http://miRTar.mbc.nctu.edu.tw/</url>.</p

Phantom Friedmann Cosmologies and Higher-Order Characteristics of Expansion

We discuss a more general class of phantom ($p < -\varrho$) cosmologies with various forms of both phantom ($w -1$) matter. We show that many types of evolution which include both Big-Bang and Big-Rip singularities are admitted and give explicit examples. Among some interesting models, there exist non-singular oscillating (or "bounce") cosmologies, which appear due to a competition between positive and negative pressure of variety of matter content. From the point of view of the current observations the most interesting cosmologies are the ones which start with a Big-Bang and terminate at a Big-Rip. A related consequence of having a possibility of two types of singularities is that there exists an unstable static universe approached by the two asymptotic models - one of them reaches Big-Bang, and another reaches Big-Rip. We also give explicit relations between density parameters $\Omega$ and the dynamical characteristics for these generalized phantom models, including higher-order observational characteristics such as jerk and "kerk". Finally, we discuss the observational quantities such as luminosity distance, angular diameter, and source counts, both in series expansion and explicitly, for phantom models. Our series expansion formulas for the luminosity distance and the apparent magnitude go as far as to the fourth-order in redshift $z$ term, which includes explicitly not only the jerk, but also the "kerk" (or "snap") which may serve as an indicator of the curvature of the universe.Comment: REVTEX 4, 23 pages, references updated, to appear in Annals of Physics (N.Y.

miRNAMap: genomic maps of microRNA genes and their target genes in mammalian genomes

Recent work has demonstrated that microRNAs (miRNAs) are involved in critical biological processes by suppressing the translation of coding genes. This work develops an integrated database, miRNAMap, to store the known miRNA genes, the putative miRNA genes, the known miRNA targets and the putative miRNA targets. The known miRNA genes in four mammalian genomes such as human, mouse, rat and dog are obtained from miRBase, and experimentally validated miRNA targets are identified in a survey of the literature. Putative miRNA precursors were identified by RNAz, which is a non-coding RNA prediction tool based on comparative sequence analysis. The mature miRNA of the putative miRNA genes is accurately determined using a machine learning approach, mmiRNA. Then, miRanda was applied to predict the miRNA targets within the conserved regions in 3′-UTR of the genes in the four mammalian genomes. The miRNAMap also provides the expression profiles of the known miRNAs, cross-species comparisons, gene annotations and cross-links to other biological databases. Both textual and graphical web interface are provided to facilitate the retrieval of data from the miRNAMap. The database is freely available at

Large, binge-type meals of high fat diet change feeding behaviour and entrain food anticipatory activity in mice

Copyright © 2014. Published by Elsevier Ltd.Peer reviewedPublisher PD

VALIDITY OF A MAKER-BASED LOCATOR FOR MEASURING IN VIVO THREEDIMENSIONAL SCAPULAR STATIC POSES USING STEREOPHOTOGRAMMETRY

The study aimed to (1) develop a marker-based scapular locator for measuring scapular poses and (2) to design an in vivo experimental procedure for this static marker-based measurement method to decrease measurement errors, and (3) to validate this scapular locator and the experimental procedure. Six young male adults were implanted into the spine of the scapula with two bone-pins that were attached with a cluster of four retroreflective markers (bone markers). The scapular poses were measured simultaneously using the developed scapular locator and the bone markers. The results showed that very high validity for scapular rotations and for the acromial angle (AA), the root of spine (RS) and the inferior angle (IA) of the scapular translation were achieved. Two main reasons contributed to the results: (1) the adjustable scapular locator and (2) careful palpation of the bony landmarks over the scapula