EFFECT OF LOW DOSES OF LOW-LET RADIATION ON THE INNATE ANTITUMOR REACTIONS IN RADIORESISTANT AND RADIOSENSITIVE MICE

BALB/c and C57BL/6 mice differ in their Th1/Th2 lymphocyte and M1/M2 macrophage phenotypes, radiosensitivity, and post-irradiation tumor incidence. In this study we evaluated the effects of repeated low-level exposures to X-rays on the development of artificial tumor colonies in the lungs of animals from the two strains and cytotoxic activities of natural killer (NK) cells and macrophages obtained from these mice. After ten daily irradiations of BALB/c or C57BL/6 mice with 0.01, 0.02, and 0.1 Gy X-rays NK cell-enriched splenocytes collected from the animals demonstrated significant and comparable up-regulation of their anti-tumor cytotoxic function. Likewise, peritoneal macrophages collected from the two irradiated strains of mice exhibited the similarly stimulated cytotoxicities against susceptible tumor cells and produced significantly more nitric oxide. These results were accompanied by the significantly reduced numbers of the neoplastic colonies induced in the lungs by intravenous injection of syngeneic tumor cells. The obtained results indicate that ten low-level irradiations with X-rays stimulate the generally similar anti-tumor reactions in BALB/c and C57BL/6 mice

Perception of nonnative tonal contrasts by Mandarin-English and English-Mandarin sequential bilinguals

This study examined the role of acquisition order and crosslinguistic similarity in influencing transfer at the initial stage of perceptually acquiring a tonal third language (L3). Perception of tones in Yoruba and Thai was tested in adult sequential bilinguals representing three different first (L1) and second language (L2) backgrounds: L1 Mandarin-L2 English (MEBs), L1 English-L2 Mandarin (EMBs), and L1 English-L2 intonational/non-tonal (EIBs). MEBs outperformed EMBs and EIBs in discriminating L3 tonal contrasts in both languages, while EMBs showed a small advantage over EIBs on Yoruba. All groups showed better overall discrimination in Thai than Yoruba, but group differences were more robust in Yoruba. MEBs’ and EMBs’ poor discrimination of certain L3 contrasts was further reflected in the L3 tones being perceived as similar to the same Mandarin tone; however, EIBs, with no knowledge of Mandarin, showed many of the same similarity judgments. These findings thus suggest that L1 tonal experience has a particularly facilitative effect in L3 tone perception, but there is also a facilitative effect of L2 tonal experience. Further, crosslinguistic perceptual similarity between L1/L2 and L3 tones, as well as acoustic similarity between different L3 tones, play a significant role at this early stage of L3 tone acquisition.Published versio

Predicting access to materialized methods by means of hidden Markov model

Method materialization is a promising data access optimization technique for multiple applications, including, in particular object programming languages with persistence, object databases, distributed computing systems, object-relational data warehouses, multimedia data warehouses, and spatial data warehouses. A drawback of this technique is that the value of a materialized method becomes invalid when an object used for computing the value of the method is updated. As a consequence, a materialized value of the method has to be recomputed. The materialized value can be recomputed either immediately after updating the object or just before calling the method. The moment the method is recomputed bears a strong impact on the overall system performance. In this paper we propose a technique of predicting access to materialized methods and objects, for the purpose of selecting the most appropriate recomputation technique. The prediction technique is based on the Hidden Markov Model (HMM). The prediction technique was implemented and evaluated experimentally. Its performance characteristics were compared to: immediate recomputation, deferred recomputation, random recomputation, and to our previous prediction technique, called a PMAP

Stimulatory effects of single low-level irradiations with X-rays on functions of murine peritoneal macrophages

A number of epidemiological and experimental data indicate that exposures to low doses of low-LET ionising radiation may trigger the activity of natural anti-tumour immune mechanisms and inhibit tumour growth. In the present study, we assessed the cytotoxic activity and production of nitric oxide, superoxide anions, and tumour necrosis factor-alfa in peritoneal macrophages collected from BALB/c mice exposed to single whole-body irradiations with 0.1, 0.2, or 1.0 Gy X-rays. The results indicate that all the tested parameters were significantly up-regulated in macrophages obtained from mice exposed to 0.1 or 0.2 Gy X-rays but not in those collected from the sham-irradiated and 1.0 Gy-exposed animals

Just-In-Time Data Distribution for Analytical Query Processing

Distributed processing commonly requires data spread across machines using a priori static or hash-based data allocation. In this paper, we explore an alternative approach that starts from a master node in control of the complete database, and a variable number of worker nodes for delegated query processing. Data is shipped just-in-time to the worker nodes using a need to know policy, and is being reused, if possible, in subsequent queries. A bidding mechanism among the workers yields a scheduling with the most efficient reuse of previously shipped data, minimizing the data transfer costs. Just-in-time data shipment allows our system to benefit from locally available idle resources to boost overall performance. The system is maintenance-free and allocation is fully transparent to users. Our experiments show that the proposed adaptive distributed architecture is a viable and flexible alternative for small scale MapReduce-type of settings