Nrf2 and Parkinson’s Disease

Parkinson’s disease (PD) results from a complex interaction of environmental and genetic influences on a background of aging. Regardless of etiology, significant clinical advances rely on identifying the common biological pathways that underpin neuronal degeneration. Oxidative stress is consistently reported as a hallmark feature of PD. Recently, it has been demonstrated that Nrf2 modulation can protect neurons from parkinsonian agents and, in some instances, reverse motor symptoms of animal models. Furthermore, baseline aberrations of Nrf2 and its associated pathway have been reported in PD patients, and genetic variability—within and around the Nrf2 gene—may modify PD susceptibility and onset. Overall, Nrf2 dysregulation has been tentatively implicated in the pathogenesis of PD and may prove to be an effective therapeutic target

Winter frost resistance of grapevine varieties belonging to different ecological and geographical groups

The influence of frost temperatures on survival of the buds was investigated in situ during 3 winters. The behavior of 375 grapevine varieties belonging to different ecological-geographical groups was studied at 3 locations. The rate of buds killed by frost ranged from 5.4 to 100%. The varieties of the group convar. occiclentalis exhibited the greatest frost resistance of buds during 3 winters with very low temperatures. In this group the percentage of killed buds was significantly lower than in the group convar. pontica and much less than in the group convar. orientalis

Cross Pixel Optical Flow Similarity for Self-Supervised Learning

We propose a novel method for learning convolutional neural image representations without manual supervision. We use motion cues in the form of optical flow, to supervise representations of static images. The obvious approach of training a network to predict flow from a single image can be needlessly difficult due to intrinsic ambiguities in this prediction task. We instead propose a much simpler learning goal: embed pixels such that the similarity between their embeddings matches that between their optical flow vectors. At test time, the learned deep network can be used without access to video or flow information and transferred to tasks such as image classification, detection, and segmentation. Our method, which significantly simplifies previous attempts at using motion for self-supervision, achieves state-of-the-art results in self-supervision using motion cues, competitive results for self-supervision in general, and is overall state of the art in self-supervised pretraining for semantic image segmentation, as demonstrated on standard benchmarks

Elastic transport through dangling-bond silicon wires on H passivated Si(100)

We evaluate the electron transmission through a dangling-bond wire on Si(100)-H (2x1). Finite wires are modelled by decoupling semi-infinite Si electrodes from the dangling-bond wire with passivating H atoms. The calculations are performed using density functional theory in a non-periodic geometry along the conduction direction. We also use Wannier functions to analyze our results and to build an effective tight-binding Hamiltonian that gives us enhanced insight in the electron scattering processes. We evaluate the transmission to the different solutions that are possible for the dangling-bond wires: Jahn-Teller distorted ones, as well as antiferromagnetic and ferromagnetic ones. The discretization of the electronic structure of the wires due to their finite size leads to interesting transmission properties that are fingerprints of the wire nature

Photothermal dynamic elastic bending in a semiconductor circular plate induced by a focused laser beam

The theoretical models of optically induced elastic bending for a semiconductor circular plate (clamped and simply supported) was derived including both plasmaelastic (PE) and thermoelastic (TE) wave influences. The PE and TE effects versus the modulation frequency of focused laser excitation were analyzed. Obtained results were compared with the optically excited elastic bending produced by homogeneous surface heat source and with experimental measurements.15th International Conference on Photoacoustic and Photothermal Phenomena, Jul 19-23, 2009, Catholic Univ Leuven, Leuven, Belgiu

Optically excited plasmaelastic waves in semiconductor plate-coupled plasma and elastic phenomena

A system of coupled plasma and elastic waves (the plasmaelastic waves) equations are analyzed. The treatment considers a semiconductor elastic plate with isotropic and homogeneous plasma and elastic properties. The solution of the coupled system of plasma and elastic equations are given for a typical photothermal configuration including the carrier surface and volume recombination processes. The analysis of the plasma density and elastic fields shows that the coupling plasmaelastic effects show the attenuation and disperse phenomena.15th International Conference on Photoacoustic and Photothermal Phenomena, Jul 19-23, 2009, Catholic Univ Leuven, Leuven, Belgiu

Soliton effects in dangling-bond wires on Si(001)

Dangling bond wires on Si(001) are prototypical one dimensional wires, which are expected to show polaronic and solitonic effects. We present electronic structure calculations, using the tight binding model, of solitons in dangling-bond wires, and demonstrate that these defects are stable in even-length wires, although approximately 0.1 eV higher in energy than a perfect wire. We also note that in contrast to conjugated polymer systems, there are two types of soliton and that the type of soliton has strong effects on the energetics of the bandgap edges, with formation of intra-gap states between 0.1 eV and 0.2 eV from the band edges. These intra-gap states are localised on the atoms comprising the soliton.Comment: 6 pages, 3 figures, 3 tables, submitted to Phys. Rev.

Anesthesia and cognitive performance in children: No evidence for a causal relationship

* Both authors contributed evenly to the manuscript Recent findings of an association between anesthesia administration in the first three years of life and later learning disabilities have created concerns that anesthesia has neurotoxic effects on synaptogenesis, causing later learning problems. An alternative hypothesis is that those children who are likely to undergo surgery early in life have significant medical problems that are associated with a vulnerability to learning disabilities. These two hypotheses were evaluated in a monozygotic concordant–discordant twin design. Data on anesthesia administration and learning abilities and disabilities were available for 1,143 monozygotic twin pairs (56 % female) from the Netherlands Twin Registry. Parents of the twins reported on anesthesia use before age 3 and again between ages 3 and 12 years. Near age 12, educational achievement and cognitive problems were assessed with standardized tests and teacher ratings. Results showed that twins who were exposed to anesthesia before age 3 had significantly lower educational achievement scores and significantly more cognitive problems than twins not exposed to anesthesia. However, there was one important exception: the unexposed co-twin from discordant pairs did not differ from their exposed cotwin. Thus, there is no evidence for a causal relationship between anesthesia administration and later learning-related outcomes in this sample. Rather, there is evidence for early anesthesia being a marker of an individual’s vulnerability for later learning problems, regardless of their exposure to anesthesia