Sex Differences in the Effect of Inflammation on Subjective Social Status: A Randomized Controlled Trial of Endotoxin in Healthy Young Adults.

It has been established that inflammation leads to a variety of changes in social experience, but one area of social experience that has been overlooked is subjective social status. Furthermore, given sex differences in the relationship between inflammation and social status, males may be more sensitive to inflammation-induced changes in social status. However, no previous studies in humans have examined this possibility. In the present study, healthy young participants (n = 115) were randomly assigned to receive either endotoxin, an experimental inflammatory challenge, or placebo. Participants reported their subjective social status at baseline (prior to injection), and approximately 2 h later (time of peak inflammatory response for the endotoxin group). Results, using ANCOVA analyses, indicated that males exposed to endotoxin, but not females, reported lower levels of subjective social status at the peak of inflammatory response (vs. placebo). These results suggest that males may be more sensitive to the effects of inflammation in certain social domains, such as perceived social status. Clinical Trial Registration: www.ClinicalTrials.gov, identifier NCT01671150

A measure of majorisation emerging from single-shot statistical mechanics

The use of the von Neumann entropy in formulating the laws of thermodynamics has recently been challenged. It is associated with the average work whereas the work guaranteed to be extracted in any single run of an experiment is the more interesting quantity in general. We show that an expression that quantifies majorisation determines the optimal guaranteed work. We argue it should therefore be the central quantity of statistical mechanics, rather than the von Neumann entropy. In the limit of many identical and independent subsystems (asymptotic i.i.d) the von Neumann entropy expressions are recovered but in the non-equilbrium regime the optimal guaranteed work can be radically different to the optimal average. Moreover our measure of majorisation governs which evolutions can be realized via thermal interactions, whereas the nondecrease of the von Neumann entropy is not sufficiently restrictive. Our results are inspired by single-shot information theory.Comment: 54 pages (15+39), 9 figures. Changed title / changed presentation, same main results / added minor result on pure bipartite state entanglement (appendix G) / near to published versio

Biogoriva - put ka smanjenju štetnih emisija i smanjenu potrošnje mineralnih goriva

Global industrialization, population growth and growth in the number of vehicles worldwide have led to increase global energy consumption and air pollution. The primary energy consumption in the world is continuously growing. The most important primary energy source is crude oil (37%). With increasing number of vehicles increases emissions. Now the world spends millions dollars to find ways to reduce CO2 emissions instead of reducing emissions of particulates and NOx. Increase in primary energy consumption can not be settled only by conventionalfossil fuels. Therefore, non-fossil fuels from relatively renewable sources are becoming an increasingly important source of energy. Biofuels are an opportunity to reduce imports of mineral fuels and emissions. From this point of the paper analyzes the biofuels.Globalna industrijalizacija, povećane broja stanovnika u svetu i povećanje broja vozila uzrokovali su rast potrošnje energije i zagađenje vazduha. Potrošnja primarne energije u svetu je u stalnom rastu. Najvažniji primarni izvor energije je nafta (37%). Sa povećanjem broja vozila povećava se i emisija štetnih gasova. Sada se u svetu troše milioni dolara za iznalaženje puteva za smanjenje emisije CO2 umesto za smanje emisije štetnih čestica i NOx. Povećanje potrošnje primarne energije ne može biti podmireno samo konvencionalnim-fosilnim gorivima. Zato ne-fosilna goriva iz relativno obnovljivih izvora postaju sve važniji izvor energije. Biogoriva su šansa da se smanji uvoz mineralnih goriva i emisije štetnih gasova. Sa tog aspekta u radu se analiziraju biogoriva

Supplementary data for the article: Stojković, D. L. J.; Bacchi, A.; Capucci, D.; Milenković, M. R.; Čobeljić, B.; Trifunović, S. R.; Andelković, K.; Jevtić, V. V.; Vuković, N.; Vukić, M.; et al. Synthesis and Characterization of Palladium(II) Complexes with Glycine Coumarin Derivatives. Journal of the Serbian Chemical Society 2016, 81 (12), 1383–1392. https://doi.org/10.2298/JSC160915087S

Supplementary material for: [https://doi.org/10.2298/JSC160915087S]Related to published version: [http://cherry.chem.bg.ac.rs/handle/123456789/2392

Smart Ionization Chamber for Gamma-Ray Monitoring

A design and implementation of a smart ionization chamber suitable for connection into gamma radiation monitoring networks is presented in this paper. The smart ionization Chamber consists of air-equivalent one liter ionization chamber with associated electronics and a built-in memory for storage of electronic data specifications. Generally, operating and measurement characteristics of the used ionization chamber are written into the memory chip attached to the chamber. A microcontroller-based data acquisition system with a mixed-mode interface has been implemented for the purpose of reading electronic data specifications from the memory chip, and for configuration and interfacing of the ionization chamber to the monitoring network using plug-and-play concept. The details of smart ionization chamber implementation and test results are included in the paper

Quantum Steering Ellipsoids

The quantum steering ellipsoid of a two-qubit state is the set of Bloch vectors that Bob can collapse Alice’s qubit to, considering all possible measurements on his qubit. We provide an elementary construction of the ellipsoid for arbitrary states, calculate its volume, and explain how this geometric representation can be made faithful. The representation provides a range of new results, and uncovers new features, such as the existence of “incomplete steering” in separable states. We show that entanglement can be analyzed in terms of three geometric features of the ellipsoid and prove that a state is separable if and only if it obeys a “nested tetrahedron” condition

Detection of solar-like oscillations from Kepler photometry of the open cluster NGC 6819

Asteroseismology of stars in clusters has been a long-sought goal because the assumption of a common age, distance and initial chemical composition allows strong tests of the theory of stellar evolution. We report results from the first 34 days of science data from the Kepler Mission for the open cluster NGC 6819 -- one of four clusters in the field of view. We obtain the first clear detections of solar-like oscillations in the cluster red giants and are able to measure the large frequency separation and the frequency of maximum oscillation power. We find that the asteroseismic parameters allow us to test cluster-membership of the stars, and even with the limited seismic data in hand, we can already identify four possible non-members despite their having a better than 80% membership probability from radial velocity measurements. We are also able to determine the oscillation amplitudes for stars that span about two orders of magnitude in luminosity and find good agreement with the prediction that oscillation amplitudes scale as the luminosity to the power of 0.7. These early results demonstrate the unique potential of asteroseismology of the stellar clusters observed by Kepler.Comment: 5 pages, 4 figures, accepted by ApJ (Lett.

Improvement for detection of microcalcifications through clustering algorithms and artificial neural networks

A new method for detecting microcalcifications in regions of interest (ROIs) extracted from digitized mammograms is proposed. The top-hat transform is a technique based on mathematical morphology operations and, in this paper, is used to perform contrast enhancement of the mi-crocalcifications. To improve microcalcification detection, a novel image sub-segmentation approach based on the possibilistic fuzzy c-means algorithm is used. From the original ROIs, window-based features, such as the mean and standard deviation, were extracted; these features were used as an input vector in a classifier. The classifier is based on an artificial neural network to identify patterns belonging to microcalcifications and healthy tissue. Our results show that the proposed method is a good alternative for automatically detecting microcalcifications, because this stage is an important part of early breast cancer detectio

Synthesis and characterization of palladium(II) complexes with glycine coumarin derivatives

A Pd(II) complex with methyl 2-([1-{2,4-dioxochroman-3-ylidene}ethyl]amino)acetate was synthesized. The structures of both the ligand and its Pd(II) complex were determined by elemental analysis, and IR and NMR spectroscopy. Recrystallization of the Pd(II) complex from DMF/water solution resulted in its hydrolysis and the formation of the dimethylamine (2-[{1-(2,4-dioxochroman-3-ylidene) ethyl} amino] acetato) palladium(II) complex, the structure of which was determined by elemental analysis, IR, H-1- and C-13-NMR spectroscopy and X-ray analysis.Supplementary material: [http://cherry.chem.bg.ac.rs/handle/123456789/3626