1,278 research outputs found
Mouse Model of Respiratory Tract Infection Induced by Waddlia chondrophila.
Waddlia chondrophila, an obligate intracellular bacterium belonging to the Chlamydiales order, is considered as an emerging pathogen. Some clinical studies highlighted a possible role of W. chondrophila in bronchiolitis, pneumonia and miscarriage. This pathogenic potential is further supported by the ability of W. chondrophila to infect and replicate within human pneumocytes, macrophages and endometrial cells. Considering that W. chondrophila might be a causative agent of respiratory tract infection, we developed a mouse model of respiratory tract infection to get insight into the pathogenesis of W. chondrophila. Following intranasal inoculation of 2 x 108 W. chondrophila, mice lost up to 40% of their body weight, and succumbed rapidly from infection with a death rate reaching 50% at day 4 post-inoculation. Bacterial loads, estimated by qPCR, increased from day 0 to day 3 post-infection and decreased thereafter in surviving mice. Bacterial growth was confirmed by detecting dividing bacteria using electron microscopy, and living bacteria were isolated from lungs 14 days post-infection. Immunohistochemistry and histopathology of infected lungs revealed the presence of bacteria associated with pneumonia characterized by an important multifocal inflammation. The high inflammatory score in the lungs was associated with the presence of pro-inflammatory cytokines in both serum and lungs at day 3 post-infection. This animal model supports the role of W. chondrophila as an agent of respiratory tract infection, and will help understanding the pathogenesis of this strict intracellular bacterium
Improving Perception to Make Distant Connections Closer
One of the challenges for perceptually grounded accounts of high-level cognition is to explain how people make connections and draw inferences between situations that superficially have little in common. Evidence suggests that people draw these connections even without having explicit, verbalizable knowledge of their bases. Instead, the connections are based on sub-symbolic representations that are grounded in perception, action, and space. One reason why people are able to spontaneously see relations between situations that initially appear to be unrelated is that their eventual perceptions are not restricted to initial appearances. Training and strategic deployment allow our perceptual processes to deliver outputs that would have otherwise required abstract or formal reasoning. Even without people having any privileged access to the internal operations of perceptual modules, these modules can be systematically altered so as to better serve our high-level reasoning needs. Moreover, perceptually based processes can be altered in a number of ways to closely approximate formally sanctioned computations. To be concrete about mechanisms of perceptual change, we present 21 illustrations of ways in which we alter, adjust, and augment our perceptual systems with the intention of having them better satisfy our needs
Fermionic field theory for directed percolation in (1+1) dimensions
We formulate directed percolation in (1+1) dimensions in the language of a
reaction-diffusion process with exclusion taking place in one space dimension.
We map the master equation that describes the dynamics of the system onto a
quantum spin chain problem. From there we build an interacting fermionic field
theory of a new type. We study the resulting theory using renormalization group
techniques. This yields numerical estimates for the critical exponents and
provides a new alternative analytic systematic procedure to study
low-dimensional directed percolation.Comment: 20 pages, 2 figure
ESR Study of (C_5H_{12}N)_2CuBr_4
ESR studies at 9.27, 95.4, and 289.7 GHz have been performed on
(CHN)CuBr down to 3.7 K. The 9.27 GHz data were acquired
with a single crystal and do not indicate the presence of any structural
transitions. The high frequency data were collected with a polycrystalline
sample and resolved two absorbances, consistent with two crystallographic
orientations of the magnetic sites and with earlier ESR studies performed at
300 K. Below T, our data confirm the presence of a spin singlet
ground state.Comment: 2 pages, 4 figs., submitted 23rd International Conference on Low
Temperature Physics (LT-23), Aug. 200
Comparison between audio and tactile systems for delivering simple navigational information to visually impaired pedestrians
Many of the current GPS (Global Positioning Systems) navigation aids use an audio method to deliver navigation information to the user. For the visually impaired person this method can be problematic. The visually impaired pedestrian relies heavily on information contained within the ambient sound environment; for location and orientation information, navigation information, and importantly, safety information. In this paper we present the design of an innovative tactile interface and verification of results obtained through experimental trials. This pilot study compared the efficiency of the tactile interface, to an audio method of delivering simple navigational information. The findings indicate that the tactile interface could be used successfully by blind and sighted pedestrians and may offer advantages over auditory interfaces
Preparing multi-partite entanglement of photons and matter qubits
We show how to make event-ready multi-partite entanglement between qubits
which may be encoded on photons or matter systems. Entangled states of matter
systems, which can also act as single photon sources, can be generated using
the entangling operation presented in quant-ph/0408040. We show how to entangle
such sources with photon qubits, which may be encoded in the dual rail,
polarization or time-bin degrees of freedom. We subsequently demonstrate how
projective measurements of the matter qubits can be used to create entangled
states of the photons alone. The state of the matter qubits is inherited by the
generated photons. Since the entangling operation can be used to generate
cluster states of matter qubits for quantum computing, our procedure enables us
to create any (entangled) photonic quantum state that can be written as the
outcome of a quantum computer.Comment: 10 pages, 4 figures; to appear in Journal of Optics
Analyse de dynamiques spatio-temporelles d’un laser
La dynamique spatio-temporelle d’un système laser avec diffraction est étudiée. La correspondance entre la structure du portrait de phase et l’organisation relative desdéfauts topologiques dans les diagrammes spatio-temporels est clairement mise en évidence. Ainsi, une dynamique de type chaos toroïdal est associée à des défauts apparaissant périodiquement (dans l’espace et dans le temps). En revanche, il n’y a plus de périodicité des défauts sur les diagrammes spatio-temporels lorsque le régime est un chaos développé
Symmetric sequence processing in a recurrent neural network model with a synchronous dynamics
The synchronous dynamics and the stationary states of a recurrent attractor
neural network model with competing synapses between symmetric sequence
processing and Hebbian pattern reconstruction is studied in this work allowing
for the presence of a self-interaction for each unit. Phase diagrams of
stationary states are obtained exhibiting phases of retrieval, symmetric and
period-two cyclic states as well as correlated and frozen-in states, in the
absence of noise. The frozen-in states are destabilised by synaptic noise and
well separated regions of correlated and cyclic states are obtained. Excitatory
or inhibitory self-interactions yield enlarged phases of fixed-point or cyclic
behaviour.Comment: Accepted for publication in Journal of Physics A: Mathematical and
Theoretica
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