Organ Donation

ABSTRACT Organ donations have a lot of controversy surrounding it. There are many reasons for and against donations. There are many who research different ways to extract organs and tissues, and others who research fake cells and tissues. We hear about religious and spiritual reasons some give for giving organs, transplanting them and arguments as to why it should not be done

Inherited rate model of the cell cycle: Kinetics of related cells, EPI-genetics of ribosomal DNA transcription and the evaluation of cancer-therapy fractionation schedules and doses

AbstractA two-variable, stochastic model of the mammalian cell cycle is proposed for the interpretation of correlations between the intermitotic times of related cells, for the analysis of heterogeneous silver staining patterns that are seen at the nucleolar organizer regions (NORs) of chromosome spreads, for the analysis of fraction-labeled-mitoses curves and for simulating the outcome of chemotherapeutic protocols having different doses and fractionation schedules.One of the model's variables represents the chromatin condensation/eplication cycle. The second variable is related to the cell's ability to grow: the number of fibrillar centers in the cell's nucleoli, in excess of the minimum number found in quiescent cells. The number of these centers is assumed to increase and decrease at random, with transition rates that are functions of the growth conditions. The chromatin variable is postulated to increase at a rate proportional to the nucleolar variable (through a mechanism involving ubiquitin), so that the cell's generation time will also be random. The number of fibrillar centers in a mitotic mother cell persists in newly-formed daughter cells, providing a mechanism for positive correlation between sibling and mother-daughter cell generation times.Expressions for the following quantities are provided as a function of the model's parameters: the average, variance and higher moments of the intermitotic time, the distribution of the number of fibrillar centers, the joint distribution of sibling, mother and daughter cell intermitotic times, the Malthusian parameters of exponential population growth, numbers that describe the damped oscillation of a perturbed population and the entropy of a cell population

Evaluation Of Automated Eye Blink Artefact Removal Using Stacked Dense Autoencoder

The presence of artefacts in Electroencephalograph (EEG) signals can have a considerable impact on the information they portray. In this comparative study, the automated removal of eye blink artefacts using the constrained latent representation of a stacked dense autoencoders (SDAE) and comparing its ability to that of the manual independent component analysis (ICA) approach was evaluated. A comparative evaluation of 5 stacked dense autoencoder architectures lead to a chosen architecture for which the ability to automatically detect and remove eye blink artefacts were both statistically and humanistically evaluated. The ability of the stacked dense autoencoder was statistically evaluated with the manual approach of ICA using the correlation coefficient, a comparative affect on the SNR using both approaches and a humanistic evaluation using visual inspections of the components of the stacked dense autoencoder reconstruction to that of the post ICA reconstruction where an inverse RMSE allowed for a further statistical evaluation of this comparison. It was found that the stacked dense autoencoder was unable to reconstruct random signal segments in any meaningful capacity when compared to that of ICA

Behavioral Sex Differences Caused by Distinct Vasopressin Sources

Dysfunction in social communication is a prominent aspect of many psychopathologies and social disorders including autism, schizophrenia, and social anxiety. Consequently, development of clinical treatment for these disorders requires an understanding of neural circuitry underlying social communication. Sex differences are a persistent feature of social disorders, where autism is more prevalent in males, while social anxiety occurs more frequently in females. A critical gap in knowledge exists in understanding the role of sex-differences in the control of social behavior and communication. A reasonable hypothesis is that differences in neural circuitry underlie sex-differentiated dysfunctions in social behavior and communication. A well-studied circuit in this regard is the sexually dimorphic expression of the neuropeptide arginine vasopressin (AVP). AVP in the nervous system originates from several distinct sources which are, in turn, regulated by different inputs and regulatory factors. Using modern molecular approaches, we can begin to define the specific role of AVP cell populations in social behavior. We demonstrate a behavioral function for the sexually dimorphic AVP neurons in the bed nucleus of the stria terminalis (BNST) and in the paraventricular nucleus of the hypothalamus (PVN). Collectively, our results indicate that AVP cell groups appear to play opposite roles in social investigation by males and females, as BNST-AVP cell ablations and BNST AVP knockdown reduced male social approach, while PVN-AVP cell ablations increased female social approach. We next utilized circuit level tracing techniques to map the inputs and outputs of BNST and medial amygdala (MeA) AVP cells, which are the major source of sexually dimorphic AVP expression. Finally, we tested the function of several sexually dimorphic BNST-AVP projection areas, such as, the lateral septum (LS), lateral habenula (LHb), and dorsal raphe (DR). In male mice, but not female mice, optogenetic stimulation of the BNST AVP terminals in the LS increased their social investigation and anxiety-like behavior in the elevated-zero maze. Antagonism of V1aR in the LS blocked optogenetic-mediated increases in male social investigation and anxiety-like behavior. Therefore, activation of a distinct BNST-LS AVP circuit modulates sex-specific social approach and anxiety-like behavior, which is mediated by V1aR within the LS. This work suggests that sex differences in the neurochemical underpinnings of social behavior may contribute to sex differences in disorders of social behavior and communication

Paradigm Shift

Paradigm Shift is a short narrative film with audio-visual interaction centered thematically around two quotations: “And those seen dancing were thought insane by those who could not hear the music.”—Friedrich Nietzsche. “I became insane—with long intervals of horrible sanity.” —Edgar Allan Poe. The dichotomy presented here is one that is explored through the cinematography, audio-visual interaction, and the compositional methodology.https://remix.berklee.edu/graduate-studies-production-technology/1118/thumbnail.jp