Adjustable tension wire guide Patent

Adjustable spiral wire winding devic

Sciatic nerve remyelination and nodal formation following olfactory ensheathing cell transplantation

Transplantation of olfactory ensheathing cells (OECs) into injured spinal cord results in improved functional outcome through axonal regeneration, remyelination, and neuroprotection. However, because little is known of the fate of OECs transplanted into injured peripheral nerve, their myelin forming potential requires investigation. To study these issues OECs were isolated from the olfactory bulbs of adult green fluorescent protein (GFP)-expressing transgenic rats and transplanted into a sciatic nerve crush lesions. Five weeks to six months after transplantation the nerves were studied histologically and it was determined that GFP-expressing OECs survived in the lesion and distributed longitudinally across the lesion zone. Immunostaining revealed a high density of isoform Nav1.6 at the newly formed nodes of Ranvier which were flanked by paranodal Caspr staining. Immuno-electron microscopy for GFP revealed transplanted OECs form peripheral type myelin. These results indicate that transplanted OECs extensively integrate into transected peripheral nerve, form myelin on regenerated peripheral nerve fibers, and reconstruct nodes of Ranvier with proper sodium channel structure

Successful I.R.S. Challenges to Dean and Crown: An Uncertain Future for Interest-Free Loans?

This Comment critiques two recent decisions, Hardee v. United States and Dickman v. Commissioner, in which the IRS successfully challenged the favorable income and gift tax treatment accorded interest-free loans. The author examines the history of the interest-free loan cases and the various interpretations of the Internal Revenue Code. The author also examines the favorable precedents in Dean v. Commissioner and Crown v. Commissioner. The author concludes that, although the IRS\u27 position that interest-free loans are taxable events may be logically defensible, the Hardee and Dickman decisions are unlikely to undermine the precedents established in Dean and Crown

High density cluster jet target for storage ring experiments

The design and performance of a newly developed cluster jet target installation for hadron physics experiments are presented which, for the first time, is able to generate a hydrogen cluster jet beam with a target thickness of above $10^{15}\,\mathrm{atoms/cm}^2$ at a distance of two metres behind the cluster jet nozzle. The properties of the cluster beam and of individual clusters themselves are studied at this installation. Special emphasis is placed on measurements of the target beam density as a function of the relevant parameters as well as on the cluster beam profiles. By means of a time-of-flight setup, measurements of the velocity of single clusters and velocity distributions were possible. The complete installation, which meets the requirements of future internal fixed target experiments at storage rings, and the results of the systematic studies on hydrogen cluster jets are presented and discussed.Comment: 10 pages, 18 figure

The Backgrounds Data Center

The Strategic Defense Initiative Organization has created data centers for midcourse, plumes, and backgrounds phenomenologies. The Backgrounds Data Center (BDC) has been designated as the prime archive for data collected by SDIO programs. The BDC maintains a Summary Catalog that contains 'metadata,' that is, information about data, such as when the data were obtained, what the spectral range of the data is, and what region of the Earth or sky was observed. Queries to this catalog result in a listing of all data sets (from all experiments in the Summary Catalog) that satisfy the specified criteria. Thus, the user can identify different experiments that made similar observations and order them from the BDC for analysis. On-site users can use the Science Analysis Facility (SAFE for this purpose. For some programs, the BDC maintains a Program Catalog, which can classify data in as many ways as desired (rather than just by position, time, and spectral range as in the Summary Catalog). For example, data sets could be tagged with such diverse parameters as solar illumination angle, signal level, or the value of a particular spectral ratio, as long as these quantities can be read from the digital record or calculated from it by the ingest program. All unclassified catalogs and unclassified data will be remotely accessible

Distribution of Fish Species in Cedar Lake

With over 13,000 described species of freshwater fishes, diversity within aquatic systems can vary extensively. At the local scale small changes in the diversity of fish species within an ecosystem will modify processes within the ecosystem such as community decomposition and metabolism. Recent analyses indicate that actual species diversity within small, shallow ponds may be higher than previously thought. Fish species distribution will differ based on location within the aquatic system relative to the species’ position in the trophic web. We will measure both quantitative and qualitative differences among species at different locations within of Cedar Lake, expecting to find a decrease in both species diversity and total number of fish as the depth increases. We will count the number of fish species and the total number of fish at each depth and use t-test analysis to determine if depth influences fish diversity

Near-Threshold eta Meson Production in Proton-Proton Collisions

The production of eta mesons has been measured in the proton-proton interaction close to the reaction threshold using the COSY-11 internal facility at the cooler synchrotron COSY. Total cross sections were determined for eight different excess energies in the range from 0.5 MeV to 5.4 MeV. The energy dependence of the total cross section is well described by the available phase-space volume weighted by FSI factors for the proton-proton and proton-eta pairs.Comment: 9 pages, 1 table, 5 figure