Creating Entertainment Applications for Cellular Phones.

Cellular phones offer a whole range of interesting and exciting possibilities for entertainment systems coupled with a very resource-constrained environment. In this article we consider the possibilities currently achievable through the example of a networked sports service. Applications that keep users up-to-date with sports results and playing fantasy team games, based on the results of actual events, are well established on the Internet; they attract millions of subscribers world-wide. As yet, the sports results services on cellular phones, even within countries that offer 3G services, are by and large SMS or WAP-based, and there are no dedicated fantasy team game services for cellular phones. In this article we present a novel application using GPRS that not only keeps users up-to-date, wherever they are, with the events of the English Premier Football League, but also provides the opportunity of playing a real-time fantasy football game as these events transpire. As we are seeing moves by cellular phone manufacturers to adopt standardized operating systems, we compare application development in Symbian, Brew, and J2ME. Although J2ME is not an operating system, it has, up until recently, been the only means of cross-platform application development for cellular phonesThis application not only takes advantage of the "nature" of the cellular network, rather than porting existing services off the Internet, but radically improves currently available services in terms of cost and efficiency. It also highlights the fact that resource constraints on a cellular phone are not a bar to creating compelling content. This technique could be applied to a whole range of sports from Formula 1 to baseball

Analysis of the resistance to heat and hydrogen peroxide stresses in COS cells transiently expressing wild type or deletion mutants of the Drosophila 27-kDa heat-shock protein

The Drosophila melanogaster small heat-shock protein, hsp27 (Dhsp27) belongs to a family of polypeptides which shares a sequence related to alpha-crystallin and which protect cell against heat shock. Dhsp27 accumulates following heat shock and, in absence of stress, in the central nervous system, imaginal discs and the gonads of the developing fly. Two internal and adjacent deletion mutants in the conserved alpha-crystallin domain of Dhsp27 were constructed. Expression vectors containing either the coding sequence of Dhsp27 or that of the two deletion mutants linked to the Simian-Virus-40 late promoter were used to transfect monkey COS cells. The transient expression of Dhsp27 was found to decrease the sensitivity of COS cells to heat and hydrogen-peroxide stresses as judged by Trypan-blue staining and indirect immunofluorescence analysis. Using this rapid test, we observed that a deletion of 62 amino acids, which lies at the 5' end of the conserved alpha-crystallin domain and covers the first 41 amino acids of this region had only a weak effect on the protective activity of Dhsp27. This suggests that the N-terminal half of the conserved alpha-crystallin domain may not be essential for the protective activity of the small hsp. In contrast, Dhsp27 was no more active when the last 42 amino acids of the alpha-crystallin domain were deleted. Biochemical fractionation and indirect immunofluorescence analysis indicated that the protective function of Dhsp27 was localized at the level of the nucleus