In Search of a Meaningful Story: Oral History and Triathlon Memory in Australia

High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) is currently being prepared as the newest video coding standard of the ITU-T Video Coding Experts Group and the ISO/IEC Moving Picture Experts Group. The main goal of the HEVC standardization effort is to enable significantly improved compression performance relative to existing standards-in the range of 50% bit-rate reduction for equal perceptual video quality. This paper provides an overview of the technical features and characteristics of the HEVC standard

Effects of sleep deprivation on neural functioning: an integrative review

Sleep deprivation has a broad variety of effects on human performance and neural functioning that manifest themselves at different levels of description. On a macroscopic level, sleep deprivation mainly affects executive functions, especially in novel tasks. Macroscopic and mesoscopic effects of sleep deprivation on brain activity include reduced cortical responsiveness to incoming stimuli, reflecting reduced attention. On a microscopic level, sleep deprivation is associated with increased levels of adenosine, a neuromodulator that has a general inhibitory effect on neural activity. The inhibition of cholinergic nuclei appears particularly relevant, as the associated decrease in cortical acetylcholine seems to cause effects of sleep deprivation on macroscopic brain activity. In general, however, the relationships between the neural effects of sleep deprivation across observation scales are poorly understood and uncovering these relationships should be a primary target in future research

Electrically excitable normal rat kidney fibroblasts: A new model system for cell-semiconductor hybrids.

In testing various designs of cell-semiconductor hybrids, the choice of a suitable type of electrically excitable cell is crucial. Here normal rat kidney (NRK) fibroblasts are presented as a cell line, easily maintained in culture, that may substitute for heart or nerve cells in many experiments. Like heart muscle cells, NRK fibroblasts form electrically coupled confluent cell layers, in which propagating action potentials are spontaneously generated. These, however, are not associated with mechanical disturbances. Here we compare heart muscle cells and NRK fibroblasts with respect to action potential waveform, morphology, and substrate adhesion profile, using the whole-cell variant of the patch-clamp technique, atomic force microscopy (AFM), and reflection interference contrast microscopy (RICM), respectively. Our results clearly demonstrate that NRK fibroblasts should provide a highly suitable test system for investigating the signal transfer between electrically excitable cells and extracellular detectors, available at a minimum cost and effort for the experimenters