Stimulation of bone growth with thrombin peptide derivatives

Disclosed is a method of stimulating bone growth at a site in a subject in need of osteoinduction. The method comprises the step of administering a therapeutically effective amount of an agonist of the non-proteolytically activated thrombin receptor to the site.Board of Regents, University of Texas Syste

Extensive Reorganization of Behavior Accompanies Ontogeny of Aggression in Male Flesh Flies

Aggression, costly in both time and energy, is often expressed by male animals in defense of valuable resources such as food or potential mates. Here we present a new insect model system for the study of aggression, the male flesh fly Sarcophaga crassipalpis, and ask whether there is an ontogeny of aggression that coincides with reproductive maturity. After establishing that reproductive maturity occurs by day 3 of age (post-eclosion), we examined the behavior of socially isolated males from different age cohorts (days 1, 2, 3, 4, and 6) upon introduction, in a test arena, with another male of the same age. The results show a pronounced development of aggression with age. The change from relative indifference to heightened aggression involves a profound increase in the frequency of high-intensity aggressive behaviors between days 1 and 3. Also noteworthy is an abrupt increase in the number of statistically significant transitions involving these full-contact agonistic behaviors on day 2. This elevated activity is trimmed back somewhat by day 3 and appears to maintain a stable plateau thereafter. No convincing evidence was found for escalation of aggression nor the establishment of a dominance relationship over the duration of the encounters. Despite the fact that aggressive interactions are brief, lasting only a few seconds, a major reorganization in the relative proportions of four major non-aggressive behaviors (accounting for at least 96% of the total observation time for each age cohort) accompanies the switch from low to high aggression. A series of control experiments, with single flies in the test arenas, indicates that these changes occur in the absence of the performance of aggressive behaviors. This parallel ontogeny of aggressive and non-aggressive behaviors has implications for understanding how the entire behavioral repertoire may be organized and reorganized to accommodate the needs of the organism

Comparison of Histidine-Tryptophan-Ketoglutarate and University of Wisconsin Preservation in Renal Transplantation

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/72258/1/j.1600-6143.2007.02065.x.pd

Impact of streamflow variability on the Colorado River system operation

May 2007.Includes bibliographical references (pages 80-81).The water supply provided by the Colorado River system is critical to millions of residents in the arid and semiarid western United States. Understanding the response of the system to possible hydrologic occurrences is important to water planners and managers for short, medium, and long term planning and operation of the system. A long sequence of historical streamflow records is available for the river system; however, this sequence is not sufficient to capture the complex temporal and spatial variability of the river system. The overall objective of the study is to determine the effect of alternative possible future hydrologic scenarios on water supply availability throughout the entire river system. Another objective is to estimate the sustainable yield of the Upper Colorado River basin. This study demonstrates that the traditional definition of the Upper Basin's sustainable yield must be reevaluated in order to determine any sort of sustainable yield volume under stochastic simulation

Scope for Credit Risk Diversification

This paper considers a simple model of credit risk and derives the limit distribution of losses under different assumptions regarding the structure of systematic risk and the nature of exposure or firm heterogeneity. We derive fat-tailed correlated loss distributions arising from Gaussian risk factors and explore the potential for risk diversification. Where possible the results are generalised to non-Gaussian distributions. The theoretical results indicate that if the firm parameters are heterogeneous but come from a common distribution, for sufficiently large portfolios there is no scope for further risk reduction through active portfolio management. However, if the firm parameters come from different distributions, then further risk reduction is possible by changing the portfolio weights. In either case, neglecting parameter heterogeneity can lead to underestimation of expected losses. But, once expected losses are controlled for, neglecting parameter heterogeneity can lead to overestimation of risk, whether measured by unexpected loss or value-at-risk