Thyroid thermogenesis in adult rat hepatocytes in primary monolayer culture: direct action of thyroid hormone in vitro.

We have studied the effect of 3,5,3'-triiodothyronine (T3) on the respiration of adult rat hepatocytes in primary monolayer culture prepared from hypothyroid rat liver. After addition of T3 to the culture medium at a concentration of 2 x 10(-7) M, oxygen consumption of the cultured cells increased detectably at 24 h and was maximal at 72--96 h, relative to control cultures (38.0 +/- 1.8 vs. 25.0 +/- 1.5 microliter/h.mg protein). The thyroid-responsive enzymes, Na+ + K+-activated adenosine triphosphatase (NaK-ATPase) and alpha-glycerophosphate dehydrogenase (GPD), each exhibited increased activity in response to T3, in parallel with the change in oxygen consumption, whereas the activity of Mg-dependent ATPase was unaffected. These responses to T3 were dose dependent over similar concentration ranges, the half-maximal response for each occurring at ca 8 x 10(-10) M. In thyroid-treated cells, the observed increase in respiration was almost completely (90%) inhibited after addition of ouabain (10(-3) M) to the culture medium. It was found also that a 4-h exposure of the cultured hepatocytes to T3 was sufficient to elicit a significant thermogenic response, measured at a time (48 h later) when T3 was no longer present in the medium. The response to T3 occurred in fully defined culture medium and was independent of the presence or absence of hypothyroid rat serum, corticosterone, or insulin, and cellular ATP was unaffected by T3 in concentrations up to 2 x 10(-7) M. The findings document that adult rat hepatocytes in primary monolayer culture respond directly to thyroid hormone; the increases in respiration and NaK-ATPase activity elicited by T3 were cotemporal and apparently coordinate

Abstract Interpretation of Supermodular Games

Supermodular games find significant applications in a variety of models, especially in operations research and economic applications of noncooperative game theory, and feature pure strategy Nash equilibria characterized as fixed points of multivalued functions on complete lattices. Pure strategy Nash equilibria of supermodular games are here approximated by resorting to the theory of abstract interpretation, a well established and known framework used for designing static analyses of programming languages. This is obtained by extending the theory of abstract interpretation in order to handle approximations of multivalued functions and by providing some methods for abstracting supermodular games, in order to obtain approximate Nash equilibria which are shown to be correct within the abstract interpretation framework

Interactive volumetric segmentation for textile micro-tomography data using wavelets and nonlocal means

This work addresses segmentation of volumetric images of woven carbon fiber textiles from micro-tomography data. We propose a semi-supervised algorithm to classify carbon fibers that requires sparse input as opposed to completely labeled images. The main contributions are: (a) design of effective discriminative classifiers, for three-dimensional textile samples, trained on wavelet features for segmentation; (b) coupling of previous step with nonlocal means as simple, efficient alternative to the Potts model; and (c) demonstration of reuse of classifier to diverse samples containing similar content. We evaluate our work by curating test sets of voxels in the absence of a complete ground truth mask. The algorithm obtains an average 0.95 F1 score on test sets and average F1 score of 0.93 on new samples. We conclude with discussion of failure cases and propose future directions toward analysis of spatiotemporal high-resolution micro-tomography images

How willing are you to accept sexual requests from slightly unattractive to exceptionally attractive imagined requestors?

This is the post print version of the article. The official published version can be accessed from the link below.In their classic study of differences in mating strategies (Clark & Hatfield, 1989), men and women demonstrated a striking difference in interest in casual sex. The current study examined the role of requestor physical attractiveness (slightly unattractive, moderately attractive and exceptionally attractive) on men's and women's willingness to accept three different requests (go out, come to apartment, go to bed) in a questionnaire study. We tested two hypotheses, using a sample of 427 men and 443 women from three countries. Hypothesis 1 states that men, relative to women, will demonstrate a greater willingness to accept the “come to apartment” and “go to bed” requests but not the “go out” request for all three levels of requestor attractiveness. This hypothesis reflects Clark and Hatfield's (1989) main findings. Hypothesis 2 states that the physical attractiveness of a potential partner will have a greater effect on women's than on men's willingness to accept all three requests, and particularly for the explicit request for casual sex. The results partially supported Hypothesis 1 and fully supported Hypothesis 2. The discussion highlights limitations of the current research and presents directions for future research

Age and environment affect constitutive immune function in Red Knots (Calidris canutus)

We studied subspecies, age and environmental effects on constitutive immune function (natural antibody and complement titres, haptoglobin activity and leukocyte concentrations) in Red Knots (Calidris canutus). We compared C. c. islandica and C. c. canutus in the Wadden Sea and found no difference in immune function between subspecies. However, C. c. canutus on their wintering grounds in Banc d’Arguin had higher natural antibody and lower complement levels than C. c. canutus or C. c. islandica in the Wadden Sea. This suggests that immune function is determined more by the surrounding environment than by subspecies. We also compared age classes in the Wadden Sea and found that first year birds had significantly lower natural antibody levels than adults, but that second year birds no longer differed from adults. Finally, we examined the interaction of age and environment in Banc d’Arguin. We found that first year birds (but not adults) in a low quality habitat had higher leukocyte concentrations than first year birds or adults in a high quality habitat. Differences in available resources and defence needs between environments, and differences among individuals differentially distributed between sites, are likely important contributors to the variation in immune function we report. Future studies, which examine these factors on wild birds, will be important for our understanding of how animals function in their natural environment.

The Chances to Produce and Detect the b-b-ubar-dbar Tetraquark at LHC

In the LHC collider a significant rate of events with double parton scattering is expected. This will be the leading mechanism for production of two b-bbar pairs. We estimate the probability of binding two b quarks into a diquark and the probability of dressing this diquark into a b-b-ubar-dbar ISP=01+ tetraquark. Calculations shows that that this bound state of two B mesons is stable against the strong interaction and has a life time of the order of ps. We estimate that the production rate at luminosity L=0.1 events per second will be about 6 tetraquarks per hour or more.Comment: Contributed talk at the XVIII European Conference on Few-Body Problems in Physics, September 8-14, Bled, Slovenia, 4 pages LaTe

Can translation invariant systems exhibit a Many-Body Localized phase?

This note is based on a talk by one of us, F. H., at the conference PSPDE II, Minho 2013. We review some of our recent works related to (the possibility of) Many-Body Localization in the absence of quenched disorder (in particular arXiv:1305.5127,arXiv:1308.6263,arXiv:1405.3279). In these works, we provide arguments why systems without quenched disorder can exhibit `asymptotic' localization, but not genuine localization.Comment: To appear in the Proceedings of the conference Particle systems and PDE's - II, held at the Center of Mathematics of the University of Minho in December 201

Optimal client recommendation for market makers in illiquid financial products

The process of liquidity provision in financial markets can result in prolonged exposure to illiquid instruments for market makers. In this case, where a proprietary position is not desired, pro-actively targeting the right client who is likely to be interested can be an effective means to offset this position, rather than relying on commensurate interest arising through natural demand. In this paper, we consider the inference of a client profile for the purpose of corporate bond recommendation, based on typical recorded information available to the market maker. Given a historical record of corporate bond transactions and bond meta-data, we use a topic-modelling analogy to develop a probabilistic technique for compiling a curated list of client recommendations for a particular bond that needs to be traded, ranked by probability of interest. We show that a model based on Latent Dirichlet Allocation offers promising performance to deliver relevant recommendations for sales traders.Comment: 12 pages, 3 figures, 1 tabl