Comment on "Self segregation versus clustering in the Evolutionary Minority Game"

This is a comment on a paper by S. Hod and E. Nakar, published in Phys. Rev. Lett. 88, 238702 (2002)Comment: 1 page (PRL-like), 1 Figure. Some changes in the text. Accepted for publication in Phys.Rev. Let

Pharmacological potential of the endogenous dipeptide kyotorphin and selected derivatives

Copyright © 2017 Perazzo, Castanho and Sá Santos. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.The endogenous peptide kyotorphin (KTP) has been extensively studied since it was discovered in 1979. The dipeptide is distributed unevenly over the brain but the majority is concentrated in the cerebral cortex. The putative KTP receptor has not been identified yet. As many other neuropeptides, KTP clearance is mediated by extracellular peptidases and peptide transporters. From the wide spectrum of biological activity of KTP, analgesia was by far the most studied. The mechanism of action is still unclear, but researchers agree that KTP induces Met-enkephalins release. More recently, KTP was proposed as biomarker of Alzheimer disease. Despite all that, KTP limited pharmacological value prompted researchers to develop derivatives more lipophilic and therefore more prone to cross the blood-brain barrier (BBB), and also more resistant to enzymatic degradation. Conjugation of KTP with functional molecules, such as ibuprofen, generated a new class of compounds with additional biological properties. Moreover, the safety profile of these derivatives compared to opioids and their efficacy as neuroprotective agents greatly increases their pharmacological value.Funding was provided by the Portuguese Agency Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (SFRH/BPD/79542/2011 fellowship to SS and SFRH/BD/52225/2013 fellowship to JP), and by Marie Skłodowska-Curie Research and Innovation Staff Exchange (RISE): call H2020-MSCA-RISE-2014, Grant agreement 644167, 2015-2019.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Factors That Could Impact on Liver Fibrosis Staging by Transient Elastography.

PublishedReviewTransient elastography (TE) based on liver stiffness measurement (LSM) is one of the most validated noninvasive methods for liver fibrosis staging in patients with chronic liver diseases. This method is painless, has no potential complications, is rapid (100 exams), in a 3-hour fasting status, and its results should be handled by specialist clinicians that are aware of the limitations of this method.This work was supported by funding from Newton Fund RCUK-CONFAP Research Partnerships Call, Fundac¸ao Car- ˜ los Chagas Filho de Amparo a Pesquisa do Estado do Rio ` de Janeiro (FAPERJ) under Grant E-26/170.021/2015 (Brazil), and Medical Research Council (MRC) Grant reference MR/ M026515/1 (UK); from Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Cient´ıfico e Tecnologico (CNPq)/Bolsa Jovem Talento ´ (BJT) under Grant 301520/2014-3; from FAPERJ under Grant E-26/110.268/2014; and from Fundac¸ao para Desenvolvi- ˜ mento Cientifico e Tecnologico em Sa ´ ude (FioTec), Rio de ´ Janeiro, Brazil

The BaBar Event Building and Level-3 Trigger Farm Upgrade

The BaBar experiment is the particle detector at the PEP-II B-factory facility at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center. During the summer shutdown 2002 the BaBar Event Building and Level-3 trigger farm were upgraded from 60 Sun Ultra-5 machines and 100MBit/s Ethernet to 50 Dual-CPU 1.4GHz Pentium-III systems with Gigabit Ethernet. Combined with an upgrade to Gigabit Ethernet on the source side and a major feature extraction software speedup, this pushes the performance of the BaBar event builder and L3 filter to 5.5kHz at current background levels, almost three times the original design rate of 2kHz. For our specific application the new farm provides 8.5 times the CPU power of the old system.Comment: Talk from the 2003 Computing in High Energy and Nuclear Physics (CHEP03), La Jolla, Ca, USA, March 2003, 4 pages, 1 eps figure, PSN MOGT00

Thermal treatment of the minority game

We study a cost function for the aggregate behavior of all the agents involved in the Minority Game (MG) or the Bar Attendance Model (BAM). The cost function allows to define a deterministic, synchronous dynamics that yields results that have the main relevant features than those of the probabilistic, sequential dynamics used for the MG or the BAM. We define a temperature through a Langevin approach in terms of the fluctuations of the average attendance. We prove that the cost function is an extensive quantity that can play the role of an internal energy of the many agent system while the temperature so defined is an intensive parameter. We compare the results of the thermal perturbation to the deterministic dynamics and prove that they agree with those obtained with the MG or BAM in the limit of very low temperature.Comment: 9 pages in PRE format, 6 figure