2,618 research outputs found
The Effects of Lipopolysaccharide-induced Neuroinflammation on Learning and Forgetting in Juvenile Rats
The inability to remember events experienced very early in life is referred to as Infantile Amnesia (IA) and has been observed in both humans and animals. Over the years interest in the phenomenon waned, but has recently increased with the discovery of new neurobiological methods to study brain function (e.g., Callaghan, Li & Richardson, 2014). The neurobiological mechanism behind IA has yet to be determined, but several innovative theories have been developed with these new research methods. The neurogenesis hypothesis theorizes that increased neurogenesis during early development disrupts previously established memories. The hippocampus, an area that mediates both the memory of a fearful experience and the memory of a context is an area that undergoes neurogenesis lifelong but especially early in development. The increased amount of neurogenesis in the hippocampus early in life may disrupt the memory of fearful contexts in young rats. The current study examined the effect of lipopolysaccharide (LPS), on the memory for a context paired with foot shock in developing rats using the context preexposure facilitation effect (CPFE) procedure. LPS is an endotoxin that activates the immune system and reduces neurogenesis in the process. Rats exposed to a context at 24 days of age and shocked, after a 22 day retention interval showed less freezing the next day than those tested after a 2 day retention interval, suggesting they forgot the context cues over time, a trait suggestive of IA. Rats injected with LPS showed significantly lower rates of freezing compared to saline-treated rats at both retention intervals, thus showing overall poorer performance rather than reduced forgetting at the longer retention interval. The results from the current study fail to support the neurogenesis hypothesis. Implications of using LPS for a test of the neurogenesis hypothesis are discussed
The Effects of Lipopolysaccharide-induced Neuroinflammation on Learning and Forgetting in Juvenile Rats
The inability to remember events experienced very early in life is referred to as Infantile Amnesia (IA) and has been observed in both humans and animals. Over the years interest in the phenomenon waned, but has recently increased with the discovery of new neurobiological methods to study brain function (e.g., Callaghan, Li & Richardson, 2014). The neurobiological mechanism behind IA has yet to be determined, but several innovative theories have been developed with these new research methods. The neurogenesis hypothesis theorizes that increased neurogenesis during early development disrupts previously established memories. The hippocampus, an area that mediates both the memory of a fearful experience and the memory of a context is an area that undergoes neurogenesis lifelong but especially early in development. The increased amount of neurogenesis in the hippocampus early in life may disrupt the memory of fearful contexts in young rats. The current study examined the effect of lipopolysaccharide (LPS), on the memory for a context paired with foot shock in developing rats using the context preexposure facilitation effect (CPFE) procedure. LPS is an endotoxin that activates the immune system and reduces neurogenesis in the process. Rats exposed to a context at 24 days of age and shocked, after a 22 day retention interval showed less freezing the next day than those tested after a 2 day retention interval, suggesting they forgot the context cues over time, a trait suggestive of IA. Rats injected with LPS showed significantly lower rates of freezing compared to saline-treated rats at both retention intervals, thus showing overall poorer performance rather than reduced forgetting at the longer retention interval. The results from the current study fail to support the neurogenesis hypothesis. Implications of using LPS for a test of the neurogenesis hypothesis are discussed
Harassment, stalking, threats and attacks targeting New Zealand politicians: a mental health issue
The harassment of politicians has significant psychosocial costs for both the victim and the perpetrator and represents an opportunity for mental health intervention.
Abstract
Objective: Due to the nature of their work, politicians are at greater risk of stalking, harassment and attack than the general population. The small, but significantly elevated risk of violence to politicians is predominantly due not to organised terrorism or politically motivated extremists but to fixated individuals with untreated serious mental disorders, usually psychosis. Our objective was to ascertain the frequency, nature and effects of unwanted harassment of politicians in New Zealand and the possible role of mental illness in this harassment.
Methods: New Zealand Members of Parliament were surveyed, with an 84% response rate (n = 102). Quantitative and qualitative data were collected on Parliamentarians’ experiences of harassment and stalking.
Results: Eighty-seven percent of politicians reported unwanted harassment ranging from disturbing communications to physical violence, with most experiencing harassment in multiple modalities and on multiple occasions. Cyberstalking and other forms of online harassment were common, and politicians felt they (and their families) had become more exposed as a result of the Internet. Half of MPs had been personally approached by their harassers, 48% had been directly threatened and 15% had been attacked. Some of these incidents were serious, involving weapons such as guns, Molotov cocktails and blunt instruments. One in three politicians had been targeted at their homes. Respondents believed the majority of those responsible for the harassment exhibited signs of mental illness.
Conclusion: The harassment of politicians in New Zealand is common and concerning. Many of those responsible were thought to be mentally ill by their victims. This harassment has significant psychosocial costs for both the victim and the perpetrator and represents an opportunity for mental health intervention
The importance of analyzing neighbor competitive response in the target-neighbor experimental design
The Star Formation Law in Nearby Galaxies on Sub-Kpc Scales
(Abridged) We present a comprehensive analysis of the relationship between
star formation rate surface density (SFR SD) and gas surface density (gas SD)
at sub-kpc resolution in a sample of 18 nearby galaxies. We use high resolution
HI data from THINGS, CO data from HERACLES and BIMA SONG, 24 micron data from
the Spitzer Space Telescope, and UV data from GALEX. We target 7 spiral
galaxies and 11 late-type/dwarf galaxies and investigate how the star formation
law differs between the H2-dominated centers of spiral galaxies, their
HI-dominated outskirts and the HI-rich late-type/dwarf galaxies.
We find that a Schmidt-type power law with index N=1.0+-0.2 relates the SFR
SD and the H2 SD across our sample of spiral galaxies, i.e., that H2 forms
stars at a constant efficiency in spirals. The average molecular gas depletion
time is ~2*10^9 yrs. We interpret the linear relation and constant depletion
time as evidence that stars are forming in GMCs with approximately uniform
properties and that the H2 SD may be more a measure of the filling fraction of
giant molecular clouds than changing conditions in the molecular gas.
The relationship between total gas SD and SFR SD varies dramatically among
and within spiral galaxies. Most galaxies show little or no correlation between
the HI SD and the SFR SD. As a result, the star formation efficiency (SFE = SFR
SD / gas SD) varies strongly across our sample and within individual galaxies.
We show that in spirals the SFE is a clear function of radius, while the dwarf
galaxies in our sample display SFEs similar to those found in the outer optical
disks of the spirals. Another general feature of our sample is a sharp
saturation of the HI SD at ~9 M_sol/pc^2 in both the spiral and dwarf galaxies.Comment: Accepted for publication in the AJ special THINGS issue. For a
high-resolution version visit: http://www.mpia.de/THINGS/Publications.htm
Ectromelia virus encodes an anti-apoptotic protein that regulates cell death
AbstractApoptosis serves as a powerful defense against damaged or pathogen-infected cells. Since apoptosis is an effective defense against viral infection, many viruses including poxviruses, encode proteins to prevent or delay apoptosis. Here we show that ectromelia virus, the causative agent of mousepox encodes an anti-apoptotic protein EVM025. Here we demonstrate that expression of functional EVM025 is crucial to prevent apoptosis triggered by virus infection and staurosporine. We demonstrate that the expression of EVM025 prevents the conformational activation of the pro-apoptotic proteins Bak and Bax, allowing the maintenance of mitochondrial membrane integrity upon infection with ECTV. Additionally, EVM025 interacted with intracellular Bak. We were able to demonstrate that EVM025 ability to inhibit Bax activation is a function of its ability to inhibit the activity of an upstream BH3 only protein Bim. Collectively, our data indicates that EVM025 inhibits apoptosis by sequestering Bak and inhibiting the activity of Bak and Bax
MILP-based local search procedures for minimizing total tardiness in the No-idle Permutation Flowshop Problem
We consider the No-idle Permutation Flowshop Scheduling Problem (NPFSP) with a total tardiness criterion. We present two Mixed Integer Linear Programming (MILP) formulations based on positional and precedence variables, respectively. We study six local search procedures that explore two different neighborhoods by exploiting the MILP formulations. Our computational experiments show that two of the proposed procedures strongly outperform the state-of-the-art metaheuristic. We update 63% of the best known solutions of the instances in Taillards’ benchmark, and 77% if we exclude those instances for which we proved that the previous best known solutions are optimal
Energy Efficient Manufacturing Scheduling: A Systematic Literature Review
The social context in relation to energy policies, energy supply, and
sustainability concerns as well as advances in more energy-efficient
technologies is driving a need for a change in the manufacturing sector. The
main purpose of this work is to provide a research framework for
energy-efficient scheduling (EES) which is a very active research area with
more than 500 papers published in the last 10 years. The reason for this
interest is mostly due to the economic and environmental impact of considering
energy in production scheduling. In this paper, we present a systematic
literature review of recent papers in this area, provide a classification of
the problems studied, and present an overview of the main aspects and
methodologies considered as well as open research challenges
Studying the universality of field induced tunnel ionization times via high-order harmonic spectroscopy
High-harmonics generation spectroscopy is a promising tool for resolving
electron dynamics and structure in atomic and molecular systems. This scheme,
commonly described by the strong field approximation, requires a deep insight
into the basic mechanism that leads to the harmonics generation. Recently, we
have demonstrated the ability to resolve the first stage of the process --
field induced tunnel ionization -- by adding a weak perturbation to the strong
fundamental field. Here we generalize this approach and show that the
assumptions behind the strong field approximation are valid over a wide range
of tunnel ionization conditions. Performing a systematic study -- modifying the
fundamental wavelength, intensity and atomic system -- we observed a good
agreement with quantum path analysis over a range of Keldysh parameters. The
generality of this scheme opens new perspectives in high harmonics
spectroscopy, holding the potential of probing large, complex molecular
systems.Comment: 11 pages, 5 figure
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