1,422 research outputs found
Alterations in the self-renewal and differentiation ability of bone marrow mesenchymal stem cells in a mouse model of rheumatoid arthritis
Introduction: Rheumatoid arthritis (RA) is a chronic systemic autoimmune disease primarily involving the synovium. Evidence in recent years has suggested that the bone marrow (BM) may be involved, and may even be the initiating site of the disease. Abnormalities in haemopoietic stem cells' (HSC) survival, proliferation and aging have been described in patients affected by RA and ascribed to abnormal support by the BM microenvironment. Mesenchymal stem cells (MSC) and their progeny constitute important components of the BM niche. In this study we test the hypothesis that the onset of inflammatory arthritis is associated with altered self-renewal and differentiation of bone marrow MSC, which alters the composition of the BM microenvironment.
Methods: We have used Balb/C Interleukin-1 receptor antagonist knock-out mice, which spontaneously develop RA-like disease in 100% of mice by 20 weeks of age to determine the number of mesenchymal progenitors and their differentiated progeny before, at the start and with progression of the disease.
Results: We showed a decrease in the number of mesenchymal progenitors with adipogenic potential and decreased bone marrow adipogenesis before disease onset. This is associated with a decrease in osteoclastogenesis. Moreover, at the onset of disease a significant increase in all mesenchymal progenitors is observed together with a block in their differentiation to osteoblasts. This is associated with accelerated bone loss.
Conclusions: Significant changes occur in the BM niche with the establishment and progression of RA-like disease. Those changes may be responsible for aspects of the disease, including the advance of osteoporosis. An understanding of the molecular mechanisms leading to those changes may lead to new strategies for therapeutic intervention
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Profiting from enabling technologies?
How to profit from innovation has been an important question for both innovation scholars and practitioners over the years. It is certainly a relevant question for all types of technological innovation, including emerging ones. Teece's (1986) profiting from innovation (PFI) framework sets forth a theory of the relevant contingencies. However, Teece's framework focuses on technologies with applications in specific domains. We focus on the question of how to profit from enabling technologies: technologies that are applicable across multiple domains. We argue that capturing value in such circumstances is fundamentally different from profiting from less-enabling technologies and raises new issues with respect to the relevant business models and public policies. This paper's contribution is threefold. It formally revises and extends the original PFI framework to include the case of enabling technologies; it provides empirical evidence to support the distinction between profiting from enabling as compared to profiting from narrower "discrete" technologies; and it generates perspectives on the appropriate business models for these technologies and discusses related public-policy implications, in light of the fact that the share of the benefits the innovator can capture is likely to be even smaller for enabling than for discrete technologies
Magnetic Reversal Time in Open Long Range Systems
Topological phase space disconnection has been recently found to be a general
phenomenon in isolated anisotropic spin systems. It sets a general framework to
understand the emergence of ferromagnetism in finite magnetic systems starting
from microscopic models without phenomenological on-site barriers. Here we
study its relevance for finite systems with long range interacting potential in
contact with a thermal bath. We show that, even in this case, the induced
magnetic reversal time is exponentially large in the number of spins, thus
determining {\it stable} (to any experimental observation time) ferromagnetic
behavior. Moreover, the explicit temperature dependence of the magnetic
reversal time obtained from the microcanonical results, is found to be in good
agreement with numerical simulations. Also, a simple and suggestive expression,
indicating the Topological Energy Threshold at which the disconnection occurs,
as a real energy barrier for many body systems, is obtained analytically for
low temperature
Axion search with a quantum-limited ferromagnetic haloscope
A ferromagnetic axion haloscope searches for Dark Matter in the form of
axions by exploiting their interaction with electronic spins. It is composed of
an axion-to-electromagnetic field transducer coupled to a sensitive rf
detector. The former is a photon-magnon hybrid system, and the latter is based
on a quantum-limited Josephson parametric amplifier. The hybrid system consists
of ten 2.1 mm diameter YIG spheres coupled to a single microwave cavity mode by
means of a static magnetic field. Our setup is the most sensitive rf
spin-magnetometer ever realized. The minimum detectable field is
T with 9 h integration time, corresponding to a limit on
the axion-electron coupling constant at 95% CL.
The scientific run of our haloscope resulted in the best limit on DM-axions to
electron coupling constant in a frequency span of about 120 MHz, corresponding
to the axion mass range -eV. This is also the first apparatus
to perform an axion mass scanning by changing the static magnetic field.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figure
Erratum: “Seed layer technique for high quality epitaxial manganite films” [AIP Advances 6, 085109 (2016)]
No abstract available
Origins of the unidirectional spin Hall magnetoresistance in metallic bilayers
Recent studies evidence the emergence of asymmetric electron transport in
layered conductors owing to the interplay between electrical conductivity,
magnetization, and the spin Hall or Rashba- Edelstein effects. Here, we
investigate the unidirectional magnetoresistance (UMR) caused by the
current-induced spin accumulation in Co/Pt and CoCr/Pt bilayers. We identify
three competing mechanisms underpinning the resistance asymmetry, namely
interface and bulk spin-dependent electron scattering and electron-magnon
scattering. Our measurements provide a consistent description of the current,
magnetic field, and temperature dependence of the UMR and show that both
positive and negative UMR can be obtained by tuning the interface and bulk
spin-dependent scattering terms relative to the magnon population
Deep Big Simple Neural Nets Excel on Handwritten Digit Recognition
Good old on-line back-propagation for plain multi-layer perceptrons yields a
very low 0.35% error rate on the famous MNIST handwritten digits benchmark. All
we need to achieve this best result so far are many hidden layers, many neurons
per layer, numerous deformed training images, and graphics cards to greatly
speed up learning.Comment: 14 pages, 2 figures, 4 listing
An improved fault mitigation strategy for CUDA Fermi GPUs
High computation is a predominant requirement in many applications. In this field, Graphic Processing Units (GPUs) are more and more adopted. Low prices and high parallelism let GPUs be attractive, even in safety critical applications. Nonetheless, new methodologies must be studied and developed to increase the dependability of GPUs. This paper presents an improved fault mitigation strategy against permanent faults for CUDA Fermi GPUs. The proposed approach exploits the reverse engineering of the block scheduling policy in CUDA Fermi GPUs in order to minimize the fault mitigation timing overhead. The graceful performance degradation achieved by the proposed technique outperforms multithreaded CPU implementations and other fault mitigation strategies for CUDA GPU, even in presence of multiple permanent faults
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