Animal Assisted Intervention for Rehabilitation Therapy and Psychotherapy

Animal-assisted Intervention (AAI) is a goal-oriented intervention that intentionally includes or incorporates animals in health, education, and human service for the purpose of therapeutic gains in humans. AAI incorporates human-animal teams in formal human service such as Animal-assisted Therapy (AAT) or Animal-assisted Education (AAE). Animal-assisted Activity (AAA) is the informal AAI often conducted on a volunteer basis by the human-animal team for motivational, educational, and recreational purposes. AAI could be used for rehabilitation therapy and psychotherapy for patients with various symptoms. AAI uses animals, mostly dogs, to aid in healing patients holistically. Dogs have an overwhelming gratitude and exuberance for life and this effect on people is astounding. Furthermore, AAI has been researched and its effectiveness on patients’ outcomes and healing is documented. With a soaring trend of the incorporation of complementary therapies into the mainstream of therapy and health care, animal-facilitated therapy has become a popular interest for the therapy team to integrate into a patient’s plan of therapy

Development of a highly sensitive real-time one step RT-PCR combined complementary locked primer technology and conjugated minor groove binder probe

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Enterovirus (EV) infections are commonly associated with encephalitis and meningitis. Detection of enteroviral RNA in clinical specimens has been demonstrated to improve the management of patients, by ruling out other causes of disease.</p> <p>Method</p> <p>To develop a sensitive and reliable assay for routine laboratory diagnosis, we developed a real-time one step reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) assay with minor groove binder probes and primers modified with complementary locked primer technology (TMC-PCR). We checked the sensitivity of the developed assay by comparing it to a previously published TaqMan probe real-time one-step RT-PCR (TTN-PCR) procedure using enteroviral isolates, Enterovirus Proficiency panels from Quality Control on Molecular Diagnostics (QCMD-2007), and clinical specimens from patients with suspected EV infections.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>One hundred clinical specimens from 158 suspected viral meningitis cases were determined to be positive by the TMC-PCR assay (63.29%), whereas only 60 were found to be positive by the TTN-PCR assay (37.97%). The positive and negative agreements between the TMC-PCR and TTN-PCR assays were 100% and 59.2%, respectively.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>This data suggest that the TMC-PCR assay may be suitable for routine diagnostic screening from patient suspected EV infection.</p

UTX mediates demethylation of H3K27me3 at muscle-specific genes during myogenesis

Polycomb (PcG) and Trithorax (TrxG) group proteins act antagonistically to establish tissue-specific patterns of gene expression. The PcG protein Ezh2 facilitates repression by catalysing histone H3-Lys27 trimethylation (H3K27me3). For expression, H3K27me3 marks are removed and replaced by TrxG protein catalysed histone H3-Lys4 trimethylation (H3K4me3). Although H3K27 demethylases have been identified, the mechanism by which these enzymes are targeted to specific genomic regions to remove H3K27me3 marks has not been established. Here, we demonstrate a two-step mechanism for UTX-mediated demethylation at muscle-specific genes during myogenesis. Although the transactivator Six4 initially recruits UTX to the regulatory region of muscle genes, the resulting loss of H3K27me3 marks is limited to the region upstream of the transcriptional start site. Removal of the repressive H3K27me3 mark within the coding region then requires RNA Polymerase II (Pol II) elongation. Interestingly, blocking Pol II elongation on transcribed genes leads to increased H3K27me3 within the coding region, and formation of bivalent (H3K27me3/H3K4me3) chromatin domains. Thus, removal of repressive H3K27me3 marks by UTX occurs through targeted recruitment followed by spreading across the gene

Autonomous Real-time Relative Navigation for Formation Flying Satellites

Relative navigation system is presented using GPS measurements from a single-channel global positioning system (GPS) simulator. The objective of this study is to provide the real-time inter-satellite relative positions as well as absolute positions for two formation flying satellites in low earth orbit. To improve the navigation performance, the absolute states are estimated using ion-free GRAPHIC (group and phase ionospheric correction) pseudo-ranges and the relative states are determined using double differential carrier-phase data and singled-differential C/A code data based on the extended Kalman filter and the unscented Kalman filter. Furthermore, pseudo-relative dynamic model and modified relative measurement model are developed. This modified EKF method prevents non-linearity of the measurement model from degrading precision by applying linearization about absolute navigation solutions not about the priori estimates. The LAMBDA method also has been used to improve the relative navigation performance by fixing ambiguities to integers for precise relative navigation. The software-based simulation has been performed and the steady state accuracies of 1 m and 6 mm ( of 3-dimensional difference errors) are achieved for the absolute and relative navigation using EKF for a short baseline leader/follower formation. In addition, the navigation performances are compared for the EKF and the UKF for 10 hours simulation, and relative position errors are mm-level for the two filters showing the similar trends

Aspirination of α-Aminoalcohol (Sarpogrelate M1)

Aspirination of α-aminoalcohol (sarpogrelate M1) has been performed under various general esterification conditions. In most cases, the desired aspirinate ester was obtained at a low yield with unexpected byproducts, the formation of which was mostly derived from the chemical properties of the tertiary α-amino group. After systematic analysis of those methods, the aspirinated sarpogrelate M1 was prepared using a two-step approach combining salicylate ester formation and acetylation

Effective constrained dynamic simulation using implicit constraint enforcement

Abstract- Stable and effective enforcement of hard constraints is one of the crucial components in controlling physics-based dynamic simulation systems. The conventional explicit Baumgarte constraint stabilization confines the time step to be within a stability limit and requires users to pick problem-dependent coefficients to achieve fast convergence or to prevent oscillations. The recently proposed post-stabilization method has shown a successful constraint drift reduction but it does not guarantee the physically correct behavior of motion and requires additional computational cost to decrease the constraint errors. This paper presents our new implicit constraint enforcement technique that is stable over large time steps and does not require problem dependent stabilization parameters. This new implicit constraint enforcement method uses the future time step to estimate the correct magnitude of the constraint forces, resulting in better stability over bigger time steps. More importantly, the proposed method generates physically conforming constraint forces while minimizing the constraint drifts, resulting in physically correct motion. Its asymptotic computational complexity is same as the explicit Baumgarte method. It can be easily integrated into various constrained dynamic systems including rigid body or deformable structure applications. This paper describes a formulation of implicit constraint enforcement and an accumulated constraint error and dynamic behavior analysis for comparison with existing methods. Index Terms – constraint, constraint drift reduction, implicit constraint, dynamic simulation, physically-based modeling I