Unraveling the developmental roadmap toward human brown adipose tissue

Increasing brown adipose tissue (BAT) mass and activation is a therapeutic strategy to treat obesity and complications. Obese and diabetic patients possess low amounts of BAT, so an efficient way to expand their mass is necessary. There is limited knowledge about how human BAT develops, differentiates, and is optimally activated. Accessing human BAT is challenging, given its low volume and anatomical dispersion. These constraints make detailed BAT-related developmental and functional mechanistic studies in humans virtually impossible. We have developed and characterized functionally and molecularly a new chemically defined protocol for the differentiation of human pluripotent stem cells (hPSCs) into brown adipocytes (BAs) that overcomes current limitations. This protocol recapitulates step by step the physiological developmental path of human BAT. The BAs obtained express BA and thermogenic markers, are insulin sensitive, and responsive to β-adrenergic stimuli. This new protocol is scalable, enabling the study of human BAs at early stages of development

Simulations and performance of the QUBIC optical beam combiner

QUBIC, the Q & U Bolometric Interferometer for Cosmology, is a novel ground-based instrument that aims to measure the extremely faint B-mode polarisation anisotropy of the cosmic microwave background at intermediate angular scales (multipoles o

Implementation of a Reconfigurable Data Protection Module for NoC-based MPSoC

Security issues are emerging to be a basic concern in modern SoC development. Since in the field of on-chip interconnections the security problem continues to remain mostly an unexplored topic, this paper proposes a novel technique for data protection that uses the communication subsystem as basis. The proposed architecture works as a firewall managing the memory accesses on the basis of a lookup table containing the access rights. This module, called Data Protection Unit (DPU), has been designed for MPSoC architectures and integrated in the Network Interfaces near the shared memory. We implement the DPU inside an MPSoC architecture on FPGA and we add features to the module to be aware of dynamic reconfiguration of the system software. Starting from a general overview of our design down to components' structure, we introduce the place and the role of the DPU module inside the system for a reconfigurable secure implementation of a MPSoC on FPGA. The description of the DPU concept, its implementation, and integration into the system are described in detail. Finally, the architecture is fully implemented on FPGA and tested on a Xilinx Virtex-II Pro board

A Data Protection Unit for NoC-based Architectures

Security is gaining increasing relevance in the development of embedded devices. Towards a secure system at each level of design, this paper addresses the security aspects related to Network-on-Chip (NoC) architectures, foreseen as the communication infrastructure of next-generation embedded devices. In the context of NoC-based Multiprocessor systems, we focus on the topic, not thoroughly faced yet, of data protection. We present the architecture of a Data Protection Unit (DPU) designed for implementation within the Network Interface (NI). The DPU supports the capability to check and limit the access rights (none, read, write or both) of processors requesting access to data locations in a shared memory - in particular distinguishing between the operating roles (supervisor or user) of processing elements. We explore different alternative implementations and demonstrate how the DPU unit does not affect the network latency if the memory request has the appropriate rights. In the experimental section we show synthesis results for different ASIC implementations of the Data Protection Unit

Cardiovascular effects of substance P and capsaicin microinjected into the nucleus tractus solitarii of the rat

This report deals with the effect of substance P (SP) and capsaicin on blood pressure and heart rate after administration into different sites of the nucleus tractus solitarii (NTS) of urethane-anesthetized rats. Microinjection of SP at 6 different coordinates throughout the NTS showed 3 sites where SP administration evoked changes in blood pressure and heart rate. The most sensitive sites where application of SP into the NTS evoked dose-dependent hypotension and bradycardia were at the level of the posterior tip of the area postrema (zero level) and at the level of the obex. Capsaicin evoked dose-dependent hypotension and bradycardia at the same sites. These results further support the possibility that SP may be a neurotransmitter or neuromodulator of baroreceptor afferents in the NTS