945 research outputs found
Adenofibroma of Skene's Duct: A Case Report
Skene's glands, also known as paraurethral glands, are homologues of the male prostate, in which painless cystic masses and inflammation due to obstruction have been rarely found and reported. In addition, there have been rare reported cases of adenocarcinoma of Skene's glands. Recently, the authors experienced the first case of adenofibroma arising in Skene's glands of a 62-year-old woman with coital pain. Hereby, we present the case with pathologic and immunohistochemical findings and a short review of literature
Mesons and nucleons from holographic QCD in a unified approach
We investigate masses and coupling constants of mesons and nucleons within a
hard wall model of holographic QCD in a unified approach. We first examine an
appropriate form of fermionic solutions by restricting the mass coupling for
the five dimensional bulk fermions and bosons. We then derive approximated
analytic solutions for the nucleons and the corresponding masses in a small
mass coupling region. In order to treat meson and nucleon properties on the
same footing, we introduce the same infrared (IR) cut in such a way that the
meson-nucleon coupling constants, i.e., g_{pi NN} and g_{rho NN} are uniquely
determined. The first order approximation with respect to a dimensionless
expansion parameter, which is valid in the small mass coupling region,
explicitly shows difficulties to avoid the IR scale problem of the hard wall
model. We discuss possible ways of circumventing these problems.Comment: 15 pages, No figure. Several typos have been remove
Excitonic emissions observed in ZnO single crystal nanorods
We report on the photoluminescent characteristics of ZnO single crystal nanorods grown by catalyst-free metalorganic vapor phase epitaxy. From photoluminescence (PL) spectra of the nanorods at 10 K, several PL peaks were observed at 3.376, 3.364, 3.360, and 3.359 eV. The PL peak at 3.376 eV is attributed to a free exciton peak while the other peaks are ascribed to neutral donor bound exciton peaks. The observation of the free exciton peak at 10 K indicates that ZnO nanorods prepared by the catalyst-free method are of high optical quality. (C) 2003 American Institute of Physics
Intranasal Introduction of Fc-Fused Interleukin-7 Provides Long-Lasting Prophylaxis against Lethal Influenza Virus Infection
Influenza A virus (IAV) infection frequently causes hospitalization and mortality due to severe immunopathology. Annual vaccination and antiviral drugs are the current countermeasures against IAV infection, but they have a limited efficacy against new IAV variants. Here, we show that intranasal pretreatment with Fc-fused interleukin-7 (IL-7-mFc) protects mice from lethal IAV infections. The protective activity of IL-7-mFc relies on transcytosis via neonatal Fc receptor (FcRn) in the lung and lasts for several weeks. Introduction of IL-7-mFc alters pulmonary immune environments, leading to recruitment of T cells from circulation and their subsequent residency as tissue-resident memory-like T (T-RM-like) cells. IL-7-mFc-primed pulmonary T-RM-like cells contribute to protection upon IAV infection by dual modes. First, T-RM-like cells, although not antigen specific but polyclonal, attenuate viral replication at the early phase of IAV infection. Second, T-RM-like cells augment expansion of IAV-specific cytotoxic T lymphocytes (CTLs), in particular at the late phase of infection, which directly control viruses. Thus, accelerated viral clearance facilitated by pulmonary T cells, which are either antigen specific or not, alleviates immunopathology in the lung and mortality from IAV infection. Depleting a subset of pulmonary T cells indicates that both CD4 and CD8 T cells contribute to protection from IAV, although IL-7-primed CD4 T cells have a more prominent role. Collectively, we propose intranasal IL-7-mFc pretreatment as an effective means for generating protective immunity against IAV infections, which could be applied to a potential prophylaxis for influenza pandemics in the future.
IMPORTANCE
The major consequence of a highly pathogenic IAV infection is severe pulmonary inflammation, which can result in organ failure and death at worst. Although vaccines for seasonal IAVs are effective, frequent variation of surface viral proteins hampers development of protective immunity. In this study, we demonstrated that intranasal IL-7-mFc pretreatment protected immunologically naive mice from lethal IAV infections. Intranasal pretreatment with IL-7-mFc induced an infiltration of T cells in the lung, which reside as effector/memory T cells with lung-retentive markers. Those IL-7-primed pulmonary T cells contributed to development of protective immunity upon IAV infection, reducing pulmonary immunopathology while increasing IAV-specific cytotoxic T lymphocytes. Since a single treatment with IL-7-mFc was effective in the protection against multiple strains of IAV for an extended period of time, our findings suggest a possibility that IL-7-mFc treatment, as a potential prophylaxis, can be developed for controlling highly pathogenic IAV infections.open1175sciescopu
Phase diagram of a Disordered Boson Hubbard Model in Two Dimensions
We study the zero-temperature phase transition of a two-dimensional
disordered boson Hubbard model. The phase diagram of this model is constructed
in terms of the disorder strength and the chemical potential. Via quantum Monte
Carlo simulations, we find a multicritical line separating the weak-disorder
regime, where a random potential is irrelevant, from the strong-disorder
regime. In the weak-disorder regime, the Mott-insulator-to-superfluid
transition occurs, while, in the strong-disorder regime, the
Bose-glass-to-superfluid transition occurs. On the multicritical line, the
insulator-to-superfluid transition has the dynamical critical exponent and the correlation length critical exponent ,
that are different from the values for the transitions off the line. We suggest
that the proliferation of the particle-hole pairs screens out the weak disorder
effects.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figures, to be published in PR
Polarization characteristics of phase retardation defect mode lasing in polymeric cholesteric liquid crystals
We have studied the lasing characteristics of a dye-doped nematic layer sandwiched by two polymeric cholesteric liquid crystal (CLC) films as photonic band gap (PBG) materials. The nematic layer acts as a defect layer, the anisotropy of which brings about the following remarkable optical characteristics: (1) reflectance in the PBG region exceeds 50% due to the retardation effect, being unpredictable from a single CLC film; (2) efficient lasing occurs either at the defect mode wavelength or at the photonic band edge; and (3) the lasing emission due to both the defect mode and the photonic band edge mode contains both right- and left-circular polarizations, while the lasing emission from a dye-doped single CLC layer with a left-handed helix is left-circularly polarized.open2
Dark matter and sub-GeV hidden U(1) in GMSB models
Motivated by the recent PAMELA and ATIC data, one is led to a scenario with
heavy vector-like dark matter in association with a hidden sector
below GeV scale. Realizing this idea in the context of gauge mediated
supersymmetry breaking (GMSB), a heavy scalar component charged under
is found to be a good dark matter candidate which can be searched for direct
scattering mediated by the Higgs boson and/or by the hidden gauge boson. The
latter turns out to put a stringent bound on the kinetic mixing parameter
between and : . For the typical range
of model parameters, we find that the decay rates of the ordinary lightest
neutralino into hidden gauge boson/gaugino and photon/gravitino are comparable,
and the former decay mode leaves displaced vertices of lepton pairs and missing
energy with distinctive length scale larger than 20 cm for invariant lepton
pair mass below 0.5 GeV. An unsatisfactory aspect of our model is that the
Sommerfeld effect cannot raise the galactic dark matter annihilation by more
than 60 times for the dark matter mass below TeV.Comment: 1+15 pages, 4 figures, version published in JCAP, references added,
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