Stress-Induced Cardiomyopathy

The irreversible termination of individual life activities and metabolism means all fatal problems ultimately terminate the heart function. It’s very important to protect the patient’s life if we have treatment to maintain heart function and care about patients’ heart response. It is known that many diseases induced heart dysfunction including Chagas disease, burn injury, smoking and other bad stresses. Chronic stress causes these physical symptoms and emotional symptoms. Due to the awareness created by the media and internet, patients are generally aware that they should seek help immediately for chest pain. Therefore, attention and studies on stress-induced heart dysfunction would help uncover the pathophysiological mechanisms of cardiac response to non-heart diseases and provide an insight of heart-protection drugs. At the same time, physicians should be aware of this new condition and how to diagnose and treat it, even though the causal mechanisms are not yet fully understood. This special chapter will discuss on the cardiac response to the stresses especially on our associated research in recent decades such as Trypanosoma cruzi (T. cruzi)-induced cardiomyopathy and burn injury–induced cardiomyopathy, and on some very popular stresses such as behavior, motion, mental, and smoking

Generalized Langevin dynamics of a nanoparticle using a finite element approach: Thermostating with correlated noise

A direct numerical simulation (DNS) procedure is employed to study the thermal motion of a nanoparticle in an incompressible Newtonian stationary fluid medium with the generalized Langevin approach. We consider both the Markovian (white noise) and non-Markovian (Ornstein-Uhlenbeck noise and Mittag-Leffler noise) processes. Initial locations of the particle are at various distances from the bounding wall to delineate wall effects. At thermal equilibrium, the numerical results are validated by comparing the calculated translational and rotational temperatures of the particle with those obtained from the equipartition theorem. The nature of the hydrodynamic interactions is verified by comparing the velocity autocorrelation functions and mean square displacements with analytical results. Numerical predictions of wall interactions with the particle in terms of mean square displacements are compared with analytical results. In the non-Markovian Langevin approach, an appropriate choice of colored noise is required to satisfy the power-law decay in the velocity autocorrelation function at long times. The results obtained by using non-Markovian Mittag-Leffler noise simultaneously satisfy the equipartition theorem and the long-time behavior of the hydrodynamic correlations for a range of memory correlation times. The Ornstein-Uhlenbeck process does not provide the appropriate hydrodynamic correlations. Comparing our DNS results to the solution of an one-dimensional generalized Langevin equation, it is observed that where the thermostat adheres to the equipartition theorem, the characteristic memory time in the noise is consistent with the inherent time scale of the memory kernel. The performance of the thermostat with respect to equilibrium and dynamic properties for various noise schemes is discussed

Mabe Pearls : A simple way to value added pearls (Pamphlet)

The Central Mari ne Fi sheries Research Institute (CMFRI), Cochin, the premjer fisheries research institute of the coun tr)', developed the technology for cul tured marine pearl production during the early 1980s. Now, scientists of the insti tute have succeeded in perfecting a simple technique for value added marine pearls, called mabe (mah-BAY) pearls. A mabe pearl is a dome shaped or image pearl produced by placing a hemisphe re or miniaturc image against the side of the oyster shell interior. The result is an exquisite pearly nacre coated miniature image of anything dear to humans like Ganesha, Saraswathy, Lakshmi, Ashoka, Crescent and Holy Cross etc. These miniature images can be made into pendants, eardrops and rings. A fine quality Mabe pearl of 10 mm size can easily fetch more than US$ 100 in international markets and an average of Rs. 1000 in local markets

A new class of nonlinear optical materials based on push-pull quinonoid molecules

This article does not have an abstract

Accelerated growth of the Indian pearl oyster Pinctada fucata in Kollam Bay, southwest coast of India.

Seed production of Pinctada fucata using induced breeding techniques were developed by the CMFRI to support the pearl culture industry. Subsequent to this, the growth of hatchery produced pearl oyster spat transplanted to pearl farms near the natural oyster beds in the Gulf of Mannar were studied. Observations indicated that the pearl spat (3 to 5 mm) produced in the hatchery have to be reared for 12 to 20 months before they reach an implantable size. Currently pearl culture farms located along the southeast coast face the problem of long grow out phase

Sub-luminous gamma-Ray pulsars

Most pulsars observed by the Fermi LAT have gamma-ray luminosities scaling with spindown power Edot as L_gamma (Edot x 10^33 erg/s)^{1/2}. However, there exist one detection and several upper limits an order of magnitude or more fainter than this trend. We describe these `sub-luminous' gamma-ray pulsars, and discuss the case for this being an orientation effect. Of the 12 known young radio pulsars with Edot>10^34 erg/s and d<2kpc several are substantially sub-luminous. The limited available geometrical constraints favor aligned geometries for these pulsars, although no one case for alignment is compelling. In this scenario GeV emission detected from such sub-luminous pulsars can be due to a lower altitude, lower-power accelerator gap.Comment: 9 pages, 4 figures; accepted to the Astrophysical Journa

PSRs J0248+6021 and J2240+5832: Young Pulsars in the Northern Galactic Plane. Discovery, Timing, and Gamma-ray observations

Pulsars PSR J0248+6021 (rotation period P=217 ms and spin-down power Edot = 2.13E35 erg/s) and PSR J2240+5832 (P=140 ms, Edot = 2.12E35 erg/s) were discovered in 1997 with the Nancay radio telescope during a northern Galactic plane survey, using the Navy-Berkeley Pulsar Processor (NBPP) filter bank. GeV gamma-ray pulsations from both were discovered using the Fermi Large Area Telescope. Twelve years of radio and polarization data allow detailed investigations. The two pulsars resemble each other both in radio and in gamma-ray data. Both are rare in having a single gamma-ray pulse offset far from the radio peak. The high dispersion measure for PSR J0248+6021 (DM = 370 pc cm^-3) is most likely due to its being within the dense, giant HII region W5 in the Perseus arm at a distance of 2 kpc, not beyond the edge of the Galaxy as obtained from models of average electron distributions. Its high transverse velocity and the low magnetic field along the line-of-sight favor this small distance. Neither gamma-ray, X-ray, nor optical data yield evidence for a pulsar wind nebula surrounding PSR J0248+6021. The gamma-ray luminosity for PSR J0248+6021 is L_ gamma = (1.4 \pm 0.3)\times 10^34 erg/s. For PSR J2240+5832, we find either L_gamma = (7.9 \pm 5.2) \times 10^34 erg/s if the pulsar is in the Outer arm, or L_gamma = (2.2 \pm 1.7) \times 10^34 erg/s for the Perseus arm. These luminosities are consistent with an L_gamma ~ sqrt(Edot) rule. Comparison of the gamma-ray pulse profiles with model predictions, including the constraints obtained from radio polarization data, favor emission in the far magnetosphere. These two pulsars differ mainly in their inclination angles and acceleration gap widths, which in turn explains the observed differences in the gamma-ray peak widths.Comment: 13 pages, Accepted to Astronomy & Astrophysic

Gravitational waves from single neutron stars: an advanced detector era survey

With the doors beginning to swing open on the new gravitational wave astronomy, this review provides an up-to-date survey of the most important physical mechanisms that could lead to emission of potentially detectable gravitational radiation from isolated and accreting neutron stars. In particular we discuss the gravitational wave-driven instability and asteroseismology formalism of the f- and r-modes, the different ways that a neutron star could form and sustain a non-axisymmetric quadrupolar "mountain" deformation, the excitation of oscillations during magnetar flares and the possible gravitational wave signature of pulsar glitches. We focus on progress made in the recent years in each topic, make a fresh assessment of the gravitational wave detectability of each mechanism and, finally, highlight key problems and desiderata for future work.Comment: 39 pages, 12 figures, 2 tables. Chapter of the book "Physics and Astrophysics of Neutron Stars", NewCompStar COST Action 1304. Minor corrections to match published versio