Pretreatment with beta-blockers and the frequency of hypokalemia in patients with acute chest pain

Plasma potassium concentration was measured at admission in 1234 patients who presented with acute chest pain. One hundred and ninety five patients were on P blockers before admission. The potassium concentrations of patients admitted early (within four hours of onsetof symptoms) were compared with those admitted later (4-18 hours after onset of symptoms). There was a transient fall in plasma potassium concentrations in patients not pre-treated with , B blockers. This was not seen in patients who had been on P blockers before admission. Nonselective, B blockers were more effective than cardioselective agents in maintaining concentrationsof plasma potassium. These findings suggest a mechanism for the beneficial effects of ,B blockers on morbidity and mortality in acute myocardial infarction

Anti-Prion Drug mPPIg5 Inhibits PrPC Conversion to PrPSc

Prion diseases, also known as transmissible spongiform encephalopathies, are a group of fatal neurodegenerative diseases that include scrapie in sheep, bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) in cattle and Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD) in humans. The 'protein only hypothesis' advocates that PrPSc, an abnormal isoform of the cellular protein PrPC, is the main and possibly sole component of prion infectious agents. Currently, no effective therapy exists for these diseases at the symptomatic phase for either humans or animals, though a number of compounds have demonstrated the ability to eliminate PrPSc in cell culture models. Of particular interest are synthetic polymers known as dendrimers which possess the unique ability to eliminate PrPSc in both an intracellular and in vitro setting. The efficacy and mode of action of the novel anti-prion dendrimer mPPIg5 was investigated through the creation of a number of innovative bio-assays based upon the scrapie cell assay. These assays were used to demonstrate that mPPIg5 is a highly effective anti-prion drug which acts, at least in part, through the inhibition of PrPC to PrPSc conversion. Understanding how a drug works is a vital component in maximising its performance. By establishing the efficacy and method of action of mPPIg5, this study will help determine which drugs are most likely to enhance this effect and also aid the design of dendrimers with anti-prion capabilities for the future

Recent measurements of the spherical and deformed isomers using the Lohengrin fission-fragment spectrometer

International audienc

Quantitative Behavioural Reasoning for Higher-order Effectful Programs: Applicative Distances (Extended Version)

This paper studies the quantitative refinements of Abramsky's applicative similarity and bisimilarity in the context of a generalisation of Fuzz, a call-by-value $\lambda$-calculus with a linear type system that can express programs sensitivity, enriched with algebraic operations \emph{\`a la} Plotkin and Power. To do so a general, abstract framework for studying behavioural relations taking values over quantales is defined according to Lawvere's analysis of generalised metric spaces. Barr's notion of relator (or lax extension) is then extended to quantale-valued relations adapting and extending results from the field of monoidal topology. Abstract notions of quantale-valued effectful applicative similarity and bisimilarity are then defined and proved to be a compatible generalised metric (in the sense of Lawvere) and pseudometric, respectively, under mild conditions

Optical application and measurement of torque on microparticles of isotropic nonabsorbing material

We show how it is possible to controllably rotate or align microscopic particles of isotropic nonabsorbing material in a TEM00 Gaussian beam trap, with simultaneous measurement of the applied torque using purely optical means. This is a simple and general method of rotation, requiring only that the particle is elongated along one direction. Thus, this method can be used to rotate or align a wide range of naturally occurring particles. The ability to measure the applied torque enables the use of this method as a quantitative tool--the rotational equivalent of optical tweezers based force measurement. As well as being of particular value for the rotation of biological specimens, this method is also suitable for the development of optically-driven micromachines.Comment: 8 pages, 6 figure

Weak capture of protons by protons

The cross section for the proton weak capture reaction $^1H(p,e^+\nu_e)^2H$ is calculated with wave functions obtained from a number of modern, realistic high-precision interactions. To minimize the uncertainty in the axial two-body current operator, its matrix element has been adjusted to reproduce the measured Gamow-Teller matrix element of tritium $\beta$ decay in model calculations using trinucleon wave functions from these interactions. A thorough analysis of the ambiguities that this procedure introduces in evaluating the two-body current contribution to the pp capture is given. Its inherent model dependence is in fact found to be very weak. The overlap integral $\Lambda^2(E=0)$ for the pp capture is predicted to be in the range 7.05--7.06, including the axial two-body current contribution, for all interactions considered.Comment: 17 pages RevTeX (twocolumn), 5 postscript figure

Quantitative Behavioural Reasoning for Higher-order Effectful Programs: Applicative Distances

International audienceThis paper studies quantitative refinements of Abramsky's applica-tive similarity and bisimilarity in the context of a generalisation of Fuzz, a call-by-value λ-calculus with a linear type system that can express program sensitivity, enriched with algebraic operations à la Plotkin and Power. To do so a general, abstract framework for studying behavioural relations taking values over quantales is introduced according to Lawvere's analysis of generalised metric spaces. Barr's notion of relator (or lax extension) is then extended to quantale-valued relations, adapting and extending results from the field of monoidal topology. Abstract notions of quantale-valued effectful applicative similarity and bisimilarity are then defined and proved to be a compatible generalised metric (in the sense of Lawvere) and pseudometric, respectively, under mild conditions