Ultrastructural studies of the mitochondriae in the striated muscles of birds with regard to experimental hypokinesis

Electron microscopic studies were carried out on the mitochrondria of the transversely striated muscles with regard to experimental hypokinesia. As compared to the central group the mitochondria of m. pectoralis thoracicus and the m. iliotibialis posterior in hypokinetic birds reveal marked changes. In filamentous and ovoid mitochondria, vacuoles can be observed which in some cases produced larger light formations with following disappearance of the cristae and destruction of mitochondria. Fat particles located at the poles of the altered mitochondria, sporadically occurring also laterally, presented another finding. The Z-lines of the sarcomere did not form a continuous line, but were somewhat shifted

Electron microscopical and histochemical studies on the transverse striated muscles of birds after prolonged hypokinesis

Studies of the gastrocnemius muscle were carried out in 4 month old cockerels of the laying hybrid after hypokinesis lasting 15 and 30 days. It was found that restricted movement resulted in dystrophic changes of myotibrils, enlargement of the sarcoplasmic reticulum and oedem of interfibrillar spaces. Histochemical studies revealed focuses of increased activity of non-specific esterase, decreased activity of dehydrogenase of lactic acid and a positive reaction of acid phosphatase

You never surf alone. Ubiquitous tracking of users' browsing habits

In the early age of the internet users enjoyed a large level of anonymity. At the time web pages were just hypertext documents; almost no personalisation of the user experience was o ered. The Web today has evolved as a world wide distributed system following specific architectural paradigms. On the web now, an enormous quantity of user generated data is shared and consumed by a network of applications and services, reasoning upon users expressed preferences and their social and physical connections. Advertising networks follow users' browsing habits while they surf the web, continuously collecting their traces and surfing patterns. We analyse how users tracking happens on the web by measuring their online footprint and estimating how quickly advertising networks are able to pro le users by their browsing habits

LIVELINESS-ALERT CAPACITY COMPLEMENTARY AND PRESENTATION ASCENDING FOR THE MIST NETWORK

Rapid advancement of cloud computing comes with a major effect round the power expenditure in world. The realization that power expenditure of cloud computing centers is essential and may probably enhance significantly later on motivates the attention of research in control over energy-aware resource furthermore to application positioning guidelines and techniques to make use of the following advice.  We introduce among an individual's-aware operation that's frequently useful for load balancing furthermore to application scaling on cloud. The essential perspective inside our strategy is working out of the energy-optimal operation system and looking to profit from amount of servers functioning in this regime

Estimation of synthetic accessibility score of drug-like molecules based on molecular complexity and fragment contributions

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>A method to estimate ease of synthesis (synthetic accessibility) of drug-like molecules is needed in many areas of the drug discovery process. The development and validation of such a method that is able to characterize molecule synthetic accessibility as a score between 1 (easy to make) and 10 (very difficult to make) is described in this article.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>The method for estimation of the synthetic accessibility score (SAscore) described here is based on a combination of fragment contributions and a complexity penalty. Fragment contributions have been calculated based on the analysis of one million representative molecules from PubChem and therefore one can say that they capture historical synthetic knowledge stored in this database. The molecular complexity score takes into account the presence of non-standard structural features, such as large rings, non-standard ring fusions, stereocomplexity and molecule size. The method has been validated by comparing calculated SAscores with ease of synthesis as estimated by experienced medicinal chemists for a set of 40 molecules. The agreement between calculated and manually estimated synthetic accessibility is very good with <it>r</it>²= 0.89.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>A novel method to estimate synthetic accessibility of molecules has been developed. This method uses historical synthetic knowledge obtained by analyzing information from millions of already synthesized chemicals and considers also molecule complexity. The method is sufficiently fast and provides results consistent with estimation of ease of synthesis by experienced medicinal chemists. The calculated SAscore may be used to support various drug discovery processes where a large number of molecules needs to be ranked based on their synthetic accessibility, for example when purchasing samples for screening, selecting hits from high-throughput screening for follow-up, or ranking molecules generated by various <it>de novo </it>design approaches.</p

Radiotherapy for tumors of the stomach and gastroesophageal junction - a review of its role in multimodal therapy

There is broad consensus on surgical resection being the backbone of curative therapy of gastric- and gastroesophageal junction carcinoma. Nevertheless, details on therapeutic approaches in addition to surgery, such as chemotherapy, radiotherapy or radiochemotherapy are discussed controversially; especially whether external beam radiotherapy should be applied in addition to chemotherapy and surgery is debated in both entities and differs widely between regions and centers. Early landmark trials such as the Intergroup-0116 and the MAGIC trial must be interpreted in the context of potentially insufficient lymph node resection. Despite shortcomings of both trials, benefits on overall survival by radiochemotherapy and adjuvant chemotherapy were confirmed in populations of D2-resected gastric cancer patients by Asian trials. Recent results on junctional carcinoma patients strongly suggest a survival benefit of neoadjuvant radiochemotherapy in curatively resectable patients. An effect of chemotherapy in the perioperative setting as given in the MAGIC study has been confirmed by the ACCORD07 trial for junctional carcinomas; however both the studies by Stahl et al. and the excellent outcome in the CROSS trial as compared to all other therapeutic approaches indicate a superiority of neoadjuvant radiochemotherapy as compared to perioperative chemotherapy in junctional carcinoma patients. Surgery alone without neoadjuvant or perioperative therapy is considered suboptimal in patients with locally advanced disease. In gastric carcinoma patients, perioperative chemotherapy has not been compared to adjuvant radiochemotherapy in a randomized setting. Nevertheless, the results of the recently published ARTIST trial and the Chinese data by Zhu and coworkers, indicate a superiority of adjuvant radiochemotherapy as compared to adjuvant chemotherapy in terms of disease free survival in Asian patients with advanced gastric carcinoma. The ongoing CRITICS trial is supposed to provide reliable conclusions about which therapy should be preferred in Western patients with gastric carcinoma. If radiotherapy is performed, modern approaches such as intensity-modulated radiotherapy and image guidance should be applied, as these methods reduce dose to organs at risk and provide a more homogenous coverage of planning target volumes

Machined Versus Cast Abutments for Dental Implants: a 1-year Within-patient Multicentre Randomized Controlled Trial Assessing Marginal Seal Capacity and Outcomes

PURPOSE To compare clinical outcomes of machined titanium abutments (machined group) versus cast cobalt-chrome abutments (cast group) and to evaluate in vitro their implant fit. MATERIALS AND METHODS This study comprised two parts. In the in vitro part, the im-plant–abutment fit of 5 cast abutments and 5 machined abutments screwed on with a torque of 30 Ncm was qualitatively and quantitatively evaluated using micro-computed tomography (µ-CT) and AgNO3 to reveal connection gaps. In the clinical part, 31 partially edentulous subjects received two single non-adjacent implant-supported crowns at three centres. At impression taking, three and a half months after implant placement, implants were randomized to receive a machined or cast abutment according to a wi-thin-patient study design. Unfortunately, four patients dropped out and one patient lost one implant before randomization, so only 26 patients had their implants randomized. Outcome measures were: prosthesis and implant failures, any complications, and radiographic peri-implant marginal bone level changes. Patients were followed up to 1 year after loading. RESULTS The fit of the implant–abutment connection was assessed in vitro using µ-CT scans. No gaps were revealed at any of the machined or cast abutments tested. In the clinical part, after randomization, three patients dropped out, no implant failed, but one crown on a cast abutment was replaced. The between-group difference in prosthesis failure was not statistically different (McNemar chi-square test P = 1.0; difference in proportions = 0.039). One complication occurred in each group, the difference not being statistically different (McNemar test P = 1.000; difference in proportions = 0; 95% CI 0.06 to 15.99). Both groups presented statistically significant peri-implant marginal bone loss from implant placement to 1 year after loading, respectively-0.76 ± 1.01 mm for machined and-0.69 ± 0.82 mm for cast abutments, with no statistically significant differences between the two groups (mean difference 0.07 mm; 95% CI-0.54 to 0.67; P = 0.828). Both groups gradually lost marginal peri-implant bone from loading to 1 year after loading but this was not significantly different, respectively-0.06 ± 0.56 mm for machined and-0.10 ± 0.29 mm for cast abutments, with no statistically significant differences between the two groups (P = 0.739; mean difference 0.07 mm; 95% CI-0.12 to 0.16; P = 0.739). CONCLUSIONS Our clinical data suggests that implant prognosis up to 1 year after loading is not affected by using machined or cast abutments. In support of these findings, in vitro analysis proved that both types of abutments allow a tight fit with no gaps. The-refore, for the time being dentists should feel free to choose whichever type they prefer. However, these preliminary results need to be confirmed by larger trials with at least 10 years of follow-up

Beyond Cookie Monster Amnesia:Real World Persistent Online Tracking

Browser fingerprinting is a relatively new method of uniquely identifying browsers that can be used to track web users. In some ways it is more privacy-threatening than tracking via cookies, as users have no direct control over it. A number of authors have considered the wide variety of techniques that can be used to fingerprint browsers; however, relatively little information is available on how widespread browser fingerprinting is, and what information is collected to create these fingerprints in the real world. To help address this gap, we crawled the 10,000 most popular websites; this gave insights into the number of websites that are using the technique, which websites are collecting fingerprinting information, and exactly what information is being retrieved. We found that approximately 69\% of websites are, potentially, involved in first-party or third-party browser fingerprinting. We further found that third-party browser fingerprinting, which is potentially more privacy-damaging, appears to be predominant in practice. We also describe \textit{FingerprintAlert}, a freely available browser extension we developed that detects and, optionally, blocks fingerprinting attempts by visited websites

Engineering Support of Microgravity Life Science Research: Development of an Avian Development Facility

The Avian Development Facility (ADF) is designed to provide a 'window' for the study of embryogenesis in space. It allows researchers to determine and then to mitigate or nullify the forces of altered gravity upon embryos when leaving and re-entering the Earth's gravity. The ADF design will allow investigations to begin their incubation after their experiments have achieved orbit, and shut down the experiment and fix specimens before leaving orbit. In effect, the ADF makes every attempt to minimize launch and re-entry effects in order to isolate and preserve the effects of the experimental variable(s) of the space environment