Taurodontism: a review on its etiology, prevalence and clinical considerations

Taurodontism can be defined as a change in tooth shape caused by the failure of Hertwig’s epithelial sheath diaphragm to invaginate at the proper horizontal level. An enlarged pulp chamber, apical displacement of the pulpal floor, and no constriction at the level of the cemento-enamel junction are the characteristic features. Although permanent molar teeth are most commonly affected, this change can also be seen in both the permanent and deciduous dentition, unilaterally or bilaterally, and in any combination of teeth or quadrants. Whilst it appears most frequently as an isolated anomaly, its association with several syndromes and abnormalities has also been reported. Despite the clinical challenges, taurodontism has received little attention from clinicians. Because of the prevalence of tauro- dontism in modern dentitions and the critical need for its true diagnosis and management, this review addresses the etiology, clinical and radiographic features of taurodontism, its association with various syndromes and anomalies, as well as important considerations in various areas of expertise dental treatments of such teeth

Immunohistochemical expression of Bcl-2 in benign and malignant salivary gland tumors

Objectives: The present study was undertaken to assess and compare the immunohistochemical expression of Bcl-2 in selected benign and malignant salivary gland tumors. Study Design: A total of 50 cases of buffered formalin-fixed, paraffin embedded tissues of previously diagnosed cases of benign and malignant salivary gland tumors from the archives of Department of Oral and Maxillofacial Pathology and Microbiology, SDM College of Dental Sciences and Hospital, Dharwad, India, were taken for the study. The immunohistochemical staining procedure was performed using monoclonal anti Bcl-2 antibody, as directed by the manufacturer. Results: Thirty six cases (72%) out of 50 cases showed a positive expression for Bcl-2. Benign salivary gland tumors showed a positive expression in 8 out of 14 cases (~57%) and malignant salivary gland tumors in 28 out of 36 cases (~78%). The staining was intense in the normal lymph node, which is used as a positive control. Bcl-2 expression was seen in both benign and in malignant salivary gland tumors taken for the study except in "canalicular adenoma". Conclusion: The immunohistochemical expression of Bcl-2 was greater and more intense in malignant salivary gland neoplasms, suggesting a high survival rate of tumor cells in malignant neoplasms. © Medicina Oral S. L

Weakly Nonlinear Stability Analysis of Temperature/Gravity-Modulated Stationary Rayleigh–Bénard Convection in a Rotating Porous Medium

The effect of time-periodic temperature/gravity modulation on thermal instability in a fluid-saturated rotating porous layer has been investigated by performing a weakly nonlinear stability analysis. The disturbances are expanded in terms of power series of amplitude of convection. The Ginzburg–Landau equation for the stationary mode of convection is obtained and consequently the individual effect of temperature/gravity modulation on heat transport has been investigated. Further, the effect of various parameters on heat transport has been analyzed and depicted graphically

Perspectives on Ecosystem Services: Approaches, Development and Valuation

Ecosystem services originate from a functioning ecosystem and are of direct value to humans. They enter the utility function either directly, or along with labour, capital, and other produced goods as inputs in a production process resulting in consumable goods. Most ecosystem goods and services have produced although usually imperfect substitutes. It is the nature of economic and population growth that some ecosystem goods and services become depleted and that humans use inputs including plentiful ecosystem goods and services to produce new capital and goods that compensate for such depletion. An economic question is whether the substitutes for ecosystem services cost society more to produce than the opportunity cost of protecting the original ecosystem services. Many ecosystem services and some ecosystem goods are commonly received for free. The marketing of ecosystem goods and services is basically an effort to turn such recipients those who benefit without ownership into buyers, thereby providing market signals that serve to help protect valuable services. Some formal arrangement is needed to make this happe

Superconductivity in CoO2_2 Layers and the Resonating Valence Bond Mean Field Theory of the Triangular Lattice t-J model

Motivated by the recent discovery of superconductivity in two dimensional CoO$_2$ layers, we present some possibly useful results of the RVB mean field theory applied to the triangular lattice. Away from half filling, the order parameter is found to be complex, and yields a fully gapped quasiparticle spectrum. The sign of the hopping plays a crucial role in the analysis, and we find that superconductivity is as fragile for one sign as it is robust for the other. Na$_x$CoO$_2\cdot y$H$_2$O is argued to belong to the robust case, by comparing the LDA Fermi surface with an effective tight binding model. The high frequency Hall constant in this system is potentially interesting, since it is pointed out to increase linearly with temperature without saturation for T $>$ T$_{degeneracy}$.Comment: Published in Physical Review B, total 1 tex + 9 eps files. Erratum added as separate tex file on November 7, 2003, a numerical factor corrected in the erratum on Dec 3, 200

IN VITRO ANTIOXIDANT AND α-AMYLASE INHIBITION ACTIVITIES OF PANCHSAKAR CHURNA

Panchsakar Churna is the composition of Cassia angustifolia, Terminalia chebula, Zingiber officinale, Foeniculum vulgare and Saindhava lavana. Aqueous extract of churna was used to investigate antioxidant activity by ferrous ion chelating assay and ferric reducing power and alpha amylase inhibition activity by dinitrosalicylic acid method (DNSA). Aqueous extract of churna showed maximum ferrous chelating activity - 42.01 and ferric reducing power - 1.5 and 83.33 % of inhibition protein denaturation at 1000 µg/ml. Panchsakar churna showed significant antioxidant and alpha amylase inhibition activities

New Scaling Law for Deuteron Production in Ultra-Relativistic Nucleus Nucleus Collisions

Deuteron production in S and Pb induced collisions at beam energies of 200 and 160 AGeV is studied in the framework of the transport theoretical approach RQMD. Strong transverse flow invalidates the differential coalescence formula in momentum space. The transverse momentum integrated $d$ yields scale in a broad rapidity interval with the squared proton densities and inversely with the produced particle rapidity densities. This kind of scaling can be linked to constant relative sizes of nucleon and pion sources at freeze-out. With increasing projectile mass the nucleon source blows up stronger than the pion source. As a result, the scaled deuteron densities drop in central Pb+Pb collisions by 15 percent as compared to S induced reactions.Comment: 12 pages + 4 postscript figures (uuencoded and included

Neutrino Masses, Baryon Asymmetry, Dark Matter and the Moduli Problem : A Complete Framework

Recent developments in string theory have led to "realistic" string compactifications which lead to moduli stabilization while generating a hierarchy between the Electroweak and Planck scales at the same time. However, this seems to suggest a rethink of our standard notions of cosmological evolution after the end of inflation and before the beginning of BBN. We argue that within classes of realistic string compactifications, there generically exists a light modulus with a mass comparable to that of the gravitino which generates a large late-time entropy when it decays. Therefore, all known mechanisms of generating the baryon asymmetry of the Universe in the literature have to take this fact into account. In this work, we find that it is still possible to naturally generate the observed baryon asymmetry of the Universe as well as light left-handed neutrino masses from a period of Affleck-Dine(AD) leptogenesis shortly after the end of inflation, in classes of realistic string constructions with a minimal extension of the MSSM below the unification scale (consisting only of right-handed neutrinos) and satisfying certain microscopic criteria described in the text. The consequences are as follows. The lightest left-handed neutrino is required to be virtually massless. The moduli (gravitino) problem can be naturally solved in this framework both within gravity and gauge mediation. The observed upper bound on the relic abundance constrains the moduli-matter and moduli-gravitino couplings since the DM is produced non-thermally within this framework. Finally, although not a definite prediction, the framework naturally allows a light right-handed neutrino and sneutrinos around the electroweak scale which could have important implications for DM as well as the LHC.Comment: 41 pages, no figures, journal version adde

Superselectors: Efficient Constructions and Applications

We introduce a new combinatorial structure: the superselector. We show that superselectors subsume several important combinatorial structures used in the past few years to solve problems in group testing, compressed sensing, multi-channel conflict resolution and data security. We prove close upper and lower bounds on the size of superselectors and we provide efficient algorithms for their constructions. Albeit our bounds are very general, when they are instantiated on the combinatorial structures that are particular cases of superselectors (e.g., (p,k,n)-selectors, (d,\ell)-list-disjunct matrices, MUT_k(r)-families, FUT(k, a)-families, etc.) they match the best known bounds in terms of size of the structures (the relevant parameter in the applications). For appropriate values of parameters, our results also provide the first efficient deterministic algorithms for the construction of such structures