Possible Involvement of Endothelin Peptides and L-Arginine-Nitric Oxide Pathway on the Effect of Endotoxin in the Rabbit Isolated Perfused Kidney

Escherichia coli endotoxin (LPS) when infused through the renal artery of the rabbit isolated perfused kidney prepared as constant pressure mode, caused a decrease in flow rate and kidney weight indicating its primary vasoconstrictor effect. This effect was predominant in kidneys from rabbits pretreated with LPS. Endothelin-1 at a concentration of 10−10 M and big endothelin-1 at a concentration of 10−8 M produced equal vasoconstrictor effects in kidney. Addition of endotheHn converting enzyme inhibitor, phosphoramidon, to the perfusion medium at a concentration of 10−6 M caused a reduction in the effects of both LPS and big ET-1 without altering the vasoconstrictor effect of ETol. However, addition of methylene blue (10−5 M), a soluble guanylate cyclase inhibitor and NG-nitro-L-arginine-methyl ester (10−6 M) to the perfusion medium caused a potentiation in the vasoconstrictor effect of LPS. Indomethacin at a concentration of 10−6 M did not alter the effect of LPS. These results were taken as evidence for the participation of endothelin peptides and the L-arginine-nitric oxide pathway in the effect ofLPS in rabbit isolated perfused kidney

New oscillation criteria for third-order differential equations with bounded and unbounded neutral coefficients

This paper examines the oscillatory behavior of solutions to a class of thirdorder differential equations with bounded and unbounded neutral coefficients. Sufficient conditions for all solutions to be oscillatory are given. Some examples are considered to illustrate the main results and suggestions for future research are also included

Question Answering: CNLP at the TREC-10 Question Answering Track

This paper describes the retrieval experiments for the main task and list task of the TREC-10 question answering track. The question answering system described automatically finds answers to questions in a large document collection. The system uses a two-stage retrieval approach to answer finding based on matching of named entities, linguistic patterns, and keywords. In answering a question, the system carries out a detailed query analysis that produces a logical query representation, an indication of the question focus, and answer clue words

Tc-Glutathione Complex (Tc -GSH) : Labelling, Chemical Characterization and Biodistribution in Rats

The chemical structure of 99mTc-GSH has been estabilished using the 99Tc isotope. Labeling of glutathione with technetium in the presence of stanous chloride gave a high yield result. In a comparative study between 99Tc and 99Tc glutathione, the Tc-GSH complex obtained was purified and characterized by uv, visible spectroscopy, HPLC, Biogel chromatography, mass and NMR spectroscopy. Stoichiometric analysis showed a 2 : 1 molar ratio of GSH/Tc for the reaction. The molecular mass assessed by mass spectroscopy was 727 Da corresponding to an oxo(bis) glutathione technetate. NMR studies demonstrated that each glutathione molecule was coordinated to technetium via cysteinyl sulfur and nitrogen atoms. The biodistribution of the complex was studied in normal rats. Blood clearance was rapid during the first hour involving a biexponential curve ( t1/2 (1) : 50 min, t1/2 (2) : 400 min ). No radioactive accumulation was found in any specific organ except kidney and bladder. All the activity excreted was found unchanged in urine. In conclusion, Tc-GSH displayed an anionic dimer form as GSH-Tc-GSH. We assume that the complex is a tetradentate (2N,2S) complex containing a pentavalent technetium coordinated by two thiol and nitrogen atoms of both GSH ligands, and an apical oxo group

Question Answering: CNLP at the TREC-2002 Question Answering Track

This paper describes the retrieval experiments for the main task and list task of the TREC-2002 question-answering track. The question answering system described automatically finds answers to questions in a large document collection. The system uses a two-stage retrieval approach to answer finding based on matching of named entities, linguistic patterns, keywords, and the use of a new inference module. In answering a question, the system carries out a detailed query analysis that produces a logical query representation, an indication of the question focus, and answer clue words

A General Security Approach for Soft-information Decoding against Smart Bursty Jammers

Malicious attacks such as jamming can cause significant disruption or complete denial of service (DoS) to wireless communication protocols. Moreover, jamming devices are getting smarter, making them difficult to detect. Forward error correction, which adds redundancy to data, is commonly deployed to protect communications against the deleterious effects of channel noise. Soft-information error correction decoders obtain reliability information from the receiver to inform their decoding, but in the presence of a jammer such information is misleading and results in degraded error correction performance. As decoders assume noise occurs independently to each bit, a bursty jammer will lead to greater degradation in performance than a non-bursty one. Here we establish, however, that such temporal dependencies can aid inferences on which bits have been subjected to jamming, thus enabling counter-measures. In particular, we introduce a pre-decoding processing step that updates log-likelihood ratio (LLR) reliability information to reflect inferences in the presence of a jammer, enabling improved decoding performance for any soft detection decoder. The proposed method requires no alteration to the decoding algorithm. Simulation results show that the method correctly infers a significant proportion of jamming in any received frame. Results with one particular decoding algorithm, the recently introduced ORBGRAND, show that the proposed method reduces the block-error rate (BLER) by an order of magnitude for a selection of codes, and prevents complete DoS at the receiver.Comment: Accepted for GLOBECOM 2022 Workshops. Contains 7 pages and 7 figure

The NuSTAR, XMM-Newton, and Suzaku View of A3395 at the Intercluster Filament Interface

Galaxy clusters are the largest virialized objects in the universe. Their merger dynamics and their interactions with the cosmic filaments that connect them are important for our understanding of the formation of large-scale structure. In addition, cosmic filaments are thought to possess the missing baryons in the universe. Studying the interaction of galaxy clusters and filaments therefore has the potential to unveil the origin of the baryons and the physical processes that occur during merger stages of galaxy clusters. In this paper, we study the connection between A3395 and the intercluster filament with NuSTAR, XMM-Newton, and Suzaku data. Since the NuSTAR observation is moderately contaminated by scattered light, we present a novel technique developed for disentangling this background from the emission from the intracluster medium. We find that the interface of the cluster and the intercluster filament connecting A3395 and A3391 does not show any signs of heated plasma, as was previously thought. This interface has low temperature, high density, and low entropy, thus we suggest that the gas is cooling, being enhanced by the turbulent or tidal "weather"driven during the early stage of the merger. Furthermore, our temperature results from the NuSTAR data are in agreement with those from XMM-Newton and from joint NuSTAR and XMM-Newton analysis for a region with ∼25% scattered light contamination within 1σ. We show that the temperature constraint of the intracluster medium is valid even when the data are contaminated up to ∼25% for ∼5 keV cluster emission