STAT5 in Cancer and Immunity

Signal transducers and activators of transcription 5 (STAT5a and STAT5b) are highly homologous proteins that are encoded by 2 separate genes and are activated by Janus-activated kinases (JAK) downstream of cytokine receptors. STAT5 proteins are activated by a wide variety of hematopoietic and nonhematopoietic cytokines and growth factors, all of which use the JAK-STAT signalling pathway as their main mode of signal transduction. STAT5 proteins critically regulate vital cellular functions such as proliferation, differentiation, and survival. The physiological importance of STAT5 proteins is underscored by the plethora of primary human tumors that have aberrant constitutive activation of these proteins, which significantly contributes to tumor cell survival and malignant progression of disease. STAT5 plays an important role in the maintenance of normal immune function and homeostasis, both of which are regulated by specific members of IL-2 family of cytokines, which share a common gamma chain (γc) in their receptor complex. STAT5 critically mediates the biological actions of members of the γc family of cytokines in the immune system. Essentially, STAT5 plays a critical role in the function and development of Tregs, and consistently activated STAT5 is associated with a suppression in antitumor immunity and an increase in proliferation, invasion, and survival of tumor cells. Thus, therapeutic targeting of STAT5 is promising in cancer

Experimental Test of Quantum No-Hiding Theorem

Linearity and unitarity are two fundamental tenets of quantum theory. Any consequence that follows from these must be respected in the quantum world. The no-cloning theorem and the no-deleting theorem are the consequences of the linearity and the unitarity. Together with the stronger no-cloning theorem they provide permanence to quantum information, thus, suggesting that in the quantum world information can neither be created nor be destroyed. In this sense quantum information is robust, but at the same time it is also fragile because any interaction with the environment may lead to loss of information. Recently, another fundamental theorem was proved, namely, the no-hiding theorem that addresses precisely the issue of information loss. It says that if any physical process leads to bleaching of quantum information from the original system, then it must reside in the rest of the universe with no information being hidden in the correlation between these two subsystems. This has applications in quantum teleportation, state randomization, private quantum channels, thermalization and black hole evaporation. Here, we report experimental test of the no-hiding theorem with the technique of nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR). We use the quantum state randomization of a qubit as one example of the bleaching process and show that the missing information can be fully recovered up to local unitary transformations in the ancilla qubits. Since NMR offers a way to test fundamental predictions of quantum theory using coherent control of quantum mechanical nuclear spin states, our experiment is a step forward in this direction.Comment: 12 pages, 6 Figs. Jharana Rani Samal, Deceased on her 27th birthday 12th Nov. 2009. The experimental work of this paper was completely carried out by the first author. We dedicate this paper to the memory of the brilliant soul of Ms. Jharana Rani Samal

A Survey on Recent Reversible Watermarking Techniques

Watermarking is a technique to protect the copyright of digital media such as image, text, music and movie. Reversible watermarking is a technique in which watermark can be removed to completely restore the original image. Reversible watermarking of digital content allows full extraction of the watermark along with the complete restoration of the original image. For the last few years, reversible watermarking techniques are gaining popularity due to its applications in important and sensitive areas like military communication, healthcare, and law-enforcement. Due to the rapid evolution of reversible watermarking techniques, a latest review of recent research in this field is highly desirable. In this survey, the performances of different latest reversible watermarking techniques are discussed on the basis of various characteristics of watermarking

Young People's Attitude in Andal Priyadarshini's Novel "Thakanam (Cremation)"

"Thakanam" is a novel that deals with the sufferings in the lives of the people who live in the cremating work. In this novel, both the young and the elderly are shown by the teacher as cremators. This article highlights the sufferings of young people who are less experienced among them. The sufferings that these young people face when they take up the cremating occupation in their lives are limitless. They hide their sufferings and show happy faces. They are seen to be personality-possessed. However, sometimes their minds get disheartened when they lose. As they move on to the next stage of life, they are unable to make the right decisions and are subject to mental struggle. This article is intended to illustrate all this from a psychological point of view

Guiding Friend

Sangam literature is a subtle depiction of the sentiments of the Aghamandars. Friend is a character that was found in all Sangam literary works who guides and helps both hero and heroine in love life.  In the context characters like friend, hero, heroine,etc. are included. The hero and heroine excelled in wealth and the friend leads in the areas of speech and action, while the best friend excels in leadership, which is one of the best qualities mentioned by psychologists. The aim o, f this study is to study the nature of the guiding friend from a psycological point of view

S5 0716+714 : GeV variability study

The GeV observations by Fermi-LAT give us the opportunity to characterize the high-energy emission (100 MeV - 300 GeV) variability properties of the BL Lac object S5 0716+714. In this study, we performed flux and spectral analysis of more than 3 year long (August 2008 to April 2012) Fermi-LAT data of the source. During this period, the source exhibits two different modes of flux variability with characteristic timescales of ~75 and ~140 days, respectively. We also notice that the flux variations are characterized by a weak spectral hardening. The GeV spectrum of the source shows a clear deviation from a simple power law, and is better explained by a broken power law. Similar to other bright Fermi blazars, the break energy does not vary with the source flux during the different activity states. We discuss several possible scenarios to explain the observed spectral break.Comment: 21 pages, 10 figures, Accepted for publication in Advances in Space Research journa

The role of chatterbots in enhancing tourism: a case study of Penang tourism spots

Chatterbots have been widely used as a tool for conversational booking assistance mainly for hotels such as the Expedia. This paper extends the use of chatterbot beyond booking by presenting the proof of concept of a chatterbot expert system called the VIZARD. The proposed VIZARD is developed using an expert system shell called verbot. The core of Vertbot 5 is the natural language processing (NLP) engine based on pattern matching. The core Verbot 5 engine is responsible for finding matches to a given user input string and firing the appropriate rule. The findings from the user acceptance test concluded that majority of the respondents agreed that the VIZARD expert system stands at an unbiased state while being more aligned on supporting the usefulness of the system