Outer Hair Cell Somatic Electromotility In Vivo and Power Transfer to the Organ of Corti

AbstractThe active amplification of sound-induced vibrations in the cochlea, known to be crucial for auditory sensitivity and frequency selectivity, is not well understood. The outer hair cell (OHC) somatic electromotility is a potential mechanism for such amplification. Its effectiveness in vivo is putatively limited by the electrical low-pass filtering of the cell's transmembrane potential. However, the transmembrane potential is an incomplete metric. We propose and estimate two metrics to evaluate the effectiveness of OHC electromotility in vivo. One metric is the OHC electromechanical ratio defined as the amplitude of the ratio of OHC displacement to the change in its transmembrane potential. The in vivo electromechanical ratio is derived from the recently measured in vivo displacements of the reticular lamina and the basilar membrane at the 19 kHz characteristic place in guinea pigs and using a model. The ratio, after accounting for the differences in OHC vibration in situ due to the impedances from the adjacent structures, is in agreement with the literature values of the in vitro electromechanical ratio measured by others. The second and more insightful metric is the OHC somatic power. Our analysis demonstrates that the organ of Corti is nearly optimized to receive maximum somatic power in vivo and that the estimated somatic power could account for the active amplification

Erroneous Word-Stress Patterns Used by EFL Yemeni Learners

This experimental study aims at investigating the English word-stress patterns used by Yemenis, learning English as a foreign language, and the erroneous stress patterns used by them. Accent or stress is a feature of high significance in English speech. At the level of a word, one syllable gets accentuated with primary stress.  To achieve the purpose of this study, and to find out to what extent word stress of Received Pronunciation English poses difficulty on Yemeni Arabic speakers using English as a foreign language, 120 subjects of various scientific disciplines, were chosen for data collection. They were recorded and their utterances went through deep analysis based on the auditory impression of the researcher and on the spectrographic evidence resulting from the speech analysis of the software program PRAAT. The most significant findings reached by the researcher were that word-stress in the four-syllable target words were the most problematic for the speakers in which 53.2% of them put the stress, randomly, on the wrong syllables in words. Three-syllable target words appeared to be less problematic as 44.4% of the participants placed the stress inaccurately in words. The least difficulties encountered by the speakers were with the two-syllable target words where 70.6% of the speakers managed to pronounce the words with correct stress placement. It is noteworthy to mention that there was a tendency among the speakers who produced wrong stress patterns, to accent either the first syllable or the one including a long vowel or a diphthong in the words

AN OBSERVATIONAL STUDY TO VALIDATE THE SYMPTOMATOLOGY AND TO EVOLVE THE DIAGNOSTIC METHODOLOGY OF SIRAKKAMBA VATHAM THROUGH SIDDHA DIAGNOSTIC TOOLS

Sirakamba vatham is a clinical entity described by Sage Yugi in his treatise Yugi Vaithiya Chinthamani- 800, as one among the 80 types of Vatha diseases described in Siddha system of medicine. The study was aimed at in depth analysis of the clinical features mentioned under Sirakamba vatham of Siddha literature and to evolve standard Siddha diagnostic methods for management for Sirakamba vatham. This study was an observational, single center study with the sample size of 26, divided into Group I (control group) having normal individuals and group II (cases with Sirakkamba vatham). At the end of the study, it was concluded, that the symptoms of Sirakkamba vatham closely resembled the symptoms of Cerebro Vascular Accident especially of posterior circulation stroke

Lawsonia intracellularis ELISA: A New Test at the ISU-VDL

Porcine Proliferative Enteropathy (PPE) is a common disease of swine which is caused by the intracellular bacterium, Lawsonia intracellularis. The performance of a recently available commercial ELISA for L. intracellularis was evaluated by comparison with an immuno-peroxidase monolayer assay (IPMA) and found to have at least 97% correlation. The same assay when conducted at different laboratories showed 100% agreement in results. Examination of serum samples from various cases submitted to the Iowa State University Veterinary Diagnostic laboratory indicated that 87% of the herds examined were sero-positive for L. intracellularis. Therefore, the Enzyme-Linked Immunosorbent Assay (ELISA) for Lawsonia intracellularis is a useful and reliable test which allows veterinary practitioners and producers to obtain same day results on swine serum samples submitted

VALIDATION OF SIDDHA PATHOLOGICAL CONCEPTS OF SIRAKAMBAVATHAM AND ITS PARALLEL ANALYSIS WITH CEREBRO VASCULAR ACCIDENTS (STROKE)

The Siddha system of medicine is widely practiced in South India and consists of an enormous classical literature that emphasize on pathological basis of disease. Contrary to conventional pathological basis of diseases, the Siddha pathology is solely based on the humoral makeup of individuals and rests on the conceptual framework formed by 96 Thathuvams (philosophies). These concepts connect the physical and inert energies of human body facilitating its existence at subtle and gross levels. Sirakkambavatham is one among the 80 Vatha diseases mentioned in the Siddha literature Yugivaithiyasinthaamani. The present literature survey has been conducted to provide an updated integrative framework of information about the pathological concepts of Sirakkambavatham from Siddha literature and its parallel analysis with Cerebrovascular accidents (Stroke).Validating the traditional text in the limelight of modern literature unveils the traditional wisdom of ancient saints of South India and provides a better approach for disease diagnosis, prevention and its management

Coupled-barrier diffusion: the case of oxygen in silicon

Oxygen migration in silicon corresponds to an apparently simple jump between neighboring bridge sites. Yet, extensive theoretical calculations have so far produced conflicting results and have failed to provide a satisfactory account of the observed $2.5$ eV activation energy. We report a comprehensive set of first-principles calculations that demonstrate that the seemingly simple oxygen jump is actually a complex process involving coupled barriers and can be properly described quantitatively in terms of an energy hypersurface with a ``saddle ridge'' and an activation energy of $\sim 2.5$ eV. Earlier calculations correspond to different points or lines on this hypersurface.Comment: 4 Figures available upon request. Accepted for publication in Phys. Rev. Let

Розробка модуля Ethernet контролю для дистанційного керування електроживильною установкою

Sound processing in the inner ear involves separation of the constituent frequencies along the length of the cochlea. Frequencies relevant to human speech (100 to 500 Hz) are processed in the apex region. Among mammals, the guinea pig cochlear apex processes similar frequencies and is thus relevant for the study of speech processing in the cochlea. However, the requirement for extensive surgery has challenged the optical accessibility of this area to investigate cochlear processing of signals without significant intrusion. A simple method is developed to provide optical access to the guinea pig cochlear apex in two directions with minimal surgery. Furthermore, all prior vibration measurements in the guinea pig apex involved opening an observation hole in the otic capsule, which has been questioned on the basis of the resulting changes to cochlear hydrodynamics. Here, this limitation is overcome by measuring the vibrations through the unopened otic capsule using phase-sensitive Fourier domain optical coherence tomography. The optically and surgically advanced method described here lays the foundation to perform minimally invasive investigation of speech-related signal processing in the cochlea. (C) The Authors. Published by SPIE under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.Funding Agencies|NIH NIDCD [R01DC000141]; NIH [R01DC004554, R01DC010201, R01DC011796]; Swedish Research Council [K2014-63X-14061-14-5]; Torsten Soderberg Foundation</p

Four species of jellyfishes recorded from Palk Bay and Gulf of Mannar

Four species of scyphozoan jellyfishes have been recorded from Palk Bay and Gulf of Mannar viz., Cassiopea cf. andromeda (Forsskål, 1775), Chrysaora caliparea (Reynaud, 1830) [species inquirenda], Mastigias cf. papua (Lesson) and Rhopilema cf. hispidum.The species Cassiopea cf. andromeda has been recorded from Tuticorin coast and the remaining three species have been recorded from Mandapam and Thiruppalaikudi coast of Palk Bay

Comparative estrogenic activity of wine extracts and organochlorine pesticide residues in food.

The human diet contains industrial-derived, endocrine-active chemicals and higher levels of naturally occurring compounds that modulate multiple endocrine pathways. Hazard and risk assessment of these mixtures is complicated by noadditive interactions between different endocrine-mediated responses. This study focused on estrogenic chemicals in the diet and compared the relative potencies or estrogen equivalents (EQs) of the daily consumption of xenoestrogenic organochlorine pesticides in food (2.44 micrograms/day) with the EQs in a single 200-ml glass of red cabernet wine. The reconstituted organochlorine mixture contained 1,1,1-trichloro-2-(p-chlorophenyl)-2-(o-chlorophenyl)ethane, 1,1,1-trichloro-2,2-bis(p-chlorophenyl)ethane, 1,1-dichloro-2,2-bis(p-chlorophenyl)ethylene, endosulfan-1, endosulfan-2, p,p'-methoxychlor, and toxaphene; the relative proportion of each chemical in the mixture resembled the composition reported in a recent U.S. Food and Drug Administration market basket survey. The following battery of in vitro 17 beta-estradiol (E2)-responsive bioassays were utilized in this study: competitive binding to mouse uterine estrogen receptor (ER); proliferation in T47D human breast cancer cells; luciferase (Luc) induction in human HepG2 cells transiently cotransfected with C3-Luc and the human ER, rat ER-alpha, or rat ER-beta; induction of chloramphenicol acetyltransferase (CAT) activity in MCF-7 human breast cancer cells transfected with E2-responsive cathepsin D-CAT or creatine kinase B-CAT plasmids. For these seven in vitro assays, the calculated EQs in extracts from 200 ml of red cabernet wine varied from 0.15 to 3.68 micrograms/day. In contrast, EQs for consumption of organochlorine pesticides (2.44 micrograms/day) varied from nondetectable to 1.24 ng/day. Based on results of the in vitro bioassays, organochlorine pesticides in food contribute minimally to dietary EQ intake

The derivation of performance expressions for communication protocols from timed Petri net models

Petri Net models have been extended in a variety of ways and have been used to prove the correctness and evaluate the performance of communication protocols. Several extensions have been proposed to model time. This work uses a form of Timed Petri Nets and presents a technique for symbolically deriving expressions which describe system performance. Unlike past work on performance evaluation of Petri Nets which assumes a priori knowledge of specific time delays, the technique presented here applies to a wide range of time delays so long as the delays satisfy a set of timing constraints. The technique is demonstrated using a simple communication protocol