Effect of cell density on thrombin binding to a specific site on bovine vascular endothelial cells.

We studied thrombin binding to proliferating and confluent endothelial cells derived from bovine vascular endothelium. [125]thrombin was incubated with nonconfluent or confluent endothelial cells and both the total amount bound and the amount linked in a 77,000-dalton thrombin-cell complex were determined. Approximately 230,000 molecules of thrombin bound per cell in nonconfluent cultures compared to 12,800 molecules per cell in confluent cultures. Approximately 67,7000 thrombin molecules were bound in an apparently covalent complex, Mr = 77,000, with each cell in sparse cultures, whereas only 4,600 thrombin molecules per cell were bound in this complex with confluent cultures. Similar studies with [125I]thrombin and endothelial cells derived from bovine cornea revealed no difference either in the total amount of thrombin bound or in the amount bound in the 77,000-dalton complex using sparse or confluent cultures. When confluent vascular endothelial cultures were wounded, additional cellular binding sites for the 77,000-dalton complex with thrombin appeared within 24 h. A 237% increase in the amount of thrombin bound to these sites was induced by a wound which resulted in a 20% decrease in cell number in the monolayer. There was no significant increase in thrombin binding to other cellular sites at 24 h. These experiments provide evidence that the first change in thrombin binding after injury is an increase in the cellular sites involved in the 77,000-dalton complex, and suggest that thrombin binding to endothelial cells may be important in the vascular response to injury

Medical students as global citizens: a qualitative study of medical students' views on global health teaching within the undergraduate medical curriculum

Background: There is increasing interest in global health teaching among medical schools and their students. Schools in the UK and internationally are considering the best structure, methods and content of global health courses. Academic work in this area, however, has tended to either be normative (specifying what global health teaching ought to look like) or descriptive (of a particular intervention, new module, elective, etc.). Methods: While a number of studies have explored student perspectives on global health teaching, these have often relied on tools such as questionnaires that generate little in-depth evidence. This study instead used qualitative methods to explore medical student perspectives on global health in the context of a new global health module established in the core medical curriculum at a UK medical school. Results: Fifth year medical students participated in a structured focus group session and semi-structured interviews designed to explore their knowledge and learning about global health issues, as well as their wider perspectives on these issues and their relevance to professional development. While perspectives on global health ranged from global health ‘advocate’ to ‘sceptic’, all of the students acknowledged the challenges of prioritising global health within a busy curriculum. Conclusions: Students are highly alert to the diverse epistemological issues that underpin global health. For some students, such interdisciplinarity is fundamental to understanding contemporary health and healthcare. For others, global health is merely a topic of geographic relevance. Furthermore, some students appeared to accept global health as a specialist area only relevant to professionals working overseas, while others considered it to be an essential part of working in the globalised world and therefore relevant to all medical professionals. Students also clearly noted that including ‘soft’ subjects and more discursive approaches to teaching and learning often sits awkwardly in a programme where ‘harder’ forms of knowledge and didactic methods tend to dominate. This suggests that more work needs to be done to explain the relevance of global health to medical students at the very beginning of their studies

The Liberal Playground: Susan Isaacs, Psychoanalysis and Progressive Education in the Interwar Era

The Cambridge Malting House, an experimental school, serves here as a case study for investigating the tensions within 1920s liberal elites between their desire to abandon some Victorian and Edwardian sets of values in favour of more democratic ones, and at the same time their insistence on preserving themselves as an integral part of the English upper class. Susan Isaacs, the manager of the Malting House, provided the parents – some of whom were the most famous scientists and intellectuals of their age – with an opportunity to fulfil their ‘fantasy’ of bringing up children in total freedom. In retrospect, however, she deeply criticized those from their milieu for not fully understanding the real socio-cultural implications of their ideological decision to make independence and freedom the core values in their children’s education. Thus, 1920s progressive education is a paradigmatic case study of the cultural and ideological inner contradictions within liberal thought in the interwar era. The article also shows how psychoanalysis – which attracted many progressive educators – played a crucial role in providing liberals of all sorts with a new language to articulate their political visions, but, at the same time, explored the limits of the liberal discourse as a whole

3 versus 7 Tesla magnetic resonance imaging for parcellations of subcortical brain structures in clinical settings

7 Tesla (7T) magnetic resonance imaging holds great promise for improved visualization of the human brain for clinical purposes. To assess whether 7T is superior regarding localization procedures of small brain structures, we compared manual parcellations of the red nucleus, subthalamic nucleus, substantia nigra, globus pallidus interna and externa. These parcellations were created on a commonly used clinical anisotropic clinical 3T with an optimized isotropic (o)3T and standard 7T scan. The clinical 3T MRI scans did not allow delineation of an anatomically plausible structure due to its limited spatial resolution. o3T and 7T parcellations were directly compared. We found that 7T outperformed the o3T MRI as reflected by higher Dice scores, which were used as a measurement of interrater agreement for manual parcellations on quantitative susceptibility maps. This increase in agreement was associated with higher contrast to noise ratios for smaller structures, but not for the larger globus pallidus segments. Additionally, control-analyses were performed to account for potential biases in manual parcellations by assessing semi-automatic parcellations. These results showed a higher consistency for structure volumes for 7T compared to optimized 3T which illustrates the importance of the use of isotropic voxels for 3D visualization of the surgical target area. Together these results indicate that 7T outperforms c3T as well as o3T given the constraints of a clinical setting

On zeros of irreducible characters lying in a normal subgroup

[EN] Let N be a normal subgroup of a finite group G. In this paper, we consider the elements g of N such that x(g)¿0 for all irreducible characters x of G. Such an element is said to be non-vanishing in G. Let p be a prime. If all p-elements of N satisfy the previous property, then we prove that N has a normal Sylow p-subgroup. As a consequence, we also study certain arithmetical properties of the G-conjugacy class sizes of the elements of N which are zeros of some irreducible character of G. In particular, if N=G, then new contributions are obtained.The first author is supported by Proyecto Prometeo II/2015/011, Generalitat Valenciana (Spain). The research of the second author is partially funded by the Istituto Nazionale di Alta Matematica - INdAM. The third author acknowledges the predoctoral grant ACIF/2016/170, Generalitat Valenciana (Spain). The first and third authors are also supported by Proyecto PGC2018-096872-B-I00, Ministerio de Ciencia, Innovacion y Universidades (Spain).Felipe Román, MJ.; Grittini, N.; Ortiz-Sotomayor, VM. (2020). On zeros of irreducible characters lying in a normal subgroup. Annali di Matematica Pura ed Applicata (1923 -). 199:1777-1789. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10231-020-00942-1S17771789199Beltrán, A., Felipe, M.J.: Prime powers as conjugacy class lengths of $$\pi$$-elements. Bull. Aust. Math. Soc. 69, 317–325 (2004)Beltrán, A., Felipe, M.J., Malle, G., Moretó, A., Navarro, G., Sanus, L., Solomon, R., Tiep, P.H.: Nilpotent and abelian Hall subgroups in finite groups. Trans. Am. Math. Soc. 368, 2497–2513 (2016)Berkovich, Y., Kazarin, L.S.: Indices of elements and normal structure of finite groups. J. Algebra 283, 564–583 (2005)Bianchi, M., Chillag, D., Lewis, M.L., Pacifici, E.: Character degree graphs that are complete graphs. Proc. Am. Math. Soc. 135, 671–676 (2007)Brough, J., Kong, Q.: On vanishing criteria that control finite group structure II. Bull. Aust. Math. Soc. 98, 251–257 (2018)Brough, J.: Non-vanishing elements in finite groups. J. Algebra 460, 387–391 (2016)Dolfi, S., Pacifici, E., Sanus, L., Spiga, P.: On the orders of zeros of irreducible characters. J. Algebra 321, 345–352 (2009)Grüninger, M.: Two remarks about non-vanishing elements in finite groups. J. Algebra 460, 366–369 (2016)Isaacs, I.M.: Character Theory of Finite Groups. Academic Press Inc., London (1976)Isaacs, I.M., Navarro, G., Wolf, T.R.: Finite group elements where no irreducible character vanishes. J. Algebra 222, 413–423 (1999)Malle, G., Navarro, G.: Characterizing normal Sylow $$p$$-subgroups by character degrees. J. Algebra 370, 402–406 (2012)Malle, G., Navarro, G., Olsson, J.B.: Zeros of characters of finite groups. J. Group Theory 3, 353–368 (2000)The GAP Group: GAP—Groups, Algorithms, and Programming. Version 4.10.0 (2018). http://www.gap-system.or

Momentum-Resolved Charge Excitations in a Prototype One Dimensional Mott Insulator

We report momentum resolved charge excitations in a one dimensional (1-D) Mott insulator studied using high resolution (~ 325 meV) inelastic x-ray scattering over the entire Brillouin zone for the first time. Excitations at the insulating gap edge are found to be highly dispersive (momentum dependent)compared to excitations observed in two dimensional Mott insulators. The observed dispersion in 1-D is consistent with charge excitations involving holons which is unique to spin-1/2 quantum chain systems. These results point to the potential utility of inelastic x-ray scattering in providing valuable information about electronic structure of strongly correlated insulators.Comment: 3 pages, 2 figures, Revised with minor change

Resonant X-Ray Scattering on the M-Edge Spectra from Triple-k Structure Phase in U_{0.75}Np_{0.25}O_{2} and UO_{2}

We derive an expression for the scattering amplitude of resonant x-ray scattering under the assumption that the Hamiltonian describing the intermediate state preserves spherical symmetry. On the basis of this expression, we demonstrate that the energy profile of the RXS spectra expected near U and Np M_4 edges from the triple-k antiferromagnetic ordering phase in UO_{2} and U_{0.75}Np_{0.25}O_{2} agree well with those from the experiments. We demonstrate that the spectra in the \sigma-\sigma' and \sigma-\pi' channels exhibit quadrupole and dipole natures, respectively.Comment: 3 pages, 3 figures, to be published in J. Phys. Soc. Jpn. Supp

Dynamical density-density correlations in one-dimensional Mott insulators

The dynamical density-density correlation function is calculated for the one-dimensional, half-filled Hubbard model extended with nearest neighbor repulsion using the Lanczos algorithm for finite size systems and analytically for large on site repulsion compared to hopping amplitudes. At the zone boundary an excitonic feature exists for any finite nearest neighbor repulsion and exhausts most of the spectral weight, even for parameters where no exciton is visible at zero momentum.Comment: 5 pages, REVTeX, epsf, 3 postscript figure

What does touch tell us about emotions in touchscreen-based gameplay?

This is the post-print version of the Article. The official published version can be accessed from the link below - Copyright @ 2012 ACM. It is posted here by permission of ACM for your personal use. Not for redistribution.Nowadays, more and more people play games on touch-screen mobile phones. This phenomenon raises a very interesting question: does touch behaviour reflect the player’s emotional state? If possible, this would not only be a valuable evaluation indicator for game designers, but also for real-time personalization of the game experience. Psychology studies on acted touch behaviour show the existence of discriminative affective profiles. In this paper, finger-stroke features during gameplay on an iPod were extracted and their discriminative power analysed. Based on touch-behaviour, machine learning algorithms were used to build systems for automatically discriminating between four emotional states (Excited, Relaxed, Frustrated, Bored), two levels of arousal and two levels of valence. The results were very interesting reaching between 69% and 77% of correct discrimination between the four emotional states. Higher results (~89%) were obtained for discriminating between two levels of arousal and two levels of valence

Incommensurate lattice distortion in the high temperature tetragonal phase of La2−x_{2-x}(Sr,Ba)x_{x}CuO4_{4}

We report incommensurate diffuse (ICD) scattering appearing in the high-temperature-tetragonal (HTT) phase of La$_{2-x}$(Sr,Ba)$_{x}$CuO$_{4}$ with $0.07 \leq x \leq 0.20$ observed by the neutron diffraction technique. For all compositions, a sharp superlattice peak of the low-temperature-orthorhombic (LTO) structure is replaced by a pair of ICD peaks with the modulation vector parallel to the CuO$_6$ octahedral tilting direction, that is, the diagonal Cu-Cu direction of the CuO$_2$ plane, above the LTO-HTT transition temperature $T_s$. The temperature dependences of the incommensurability $\delta$ for all samples scale approximately as $T/T_s$, while those of the integrated intensity of the ICD peaks scale as $(T-T_s)^{-1}$. These observations together with absence of ICD peaks in the non-superconducting $x=0.05$ sample evince a universal incommensurate lattice instability of hole-doped 214 cuprates in the superconducting regime.Comment: 6 pages, 6 figure