16,544 research outputs found
On the function of the mammalian renal papilla and the peristalsis of the surrounding pelvis
This is an informal personal review of the development over time of my ideas about the concentrating mechanism of the mammalian renal papilla. It had been observed that animals with a need to produce a concentrated urine have a long renal papilla. I saw the function of the long papilla in desert rodents as an elongation of the counter-current concentrating mechanism of the inner medulla. This model led me to overlook contrary evidence. For example, in many experiments, the final urine has a higher osmolality than that of the tissue at the tip of the papilla. In addition, we had observations of the peristalsis of the renal pelvis surrounding the papilla. The urine concentration falls if the peristalsis is stopped. I was wrong; together, these lines of evidence show that the renal papilla is not just an elongation of the inner medulla. We are left without a full explanation of the concentrating mechanism of the mammalian renal papilla. It is hoped that other researchers will tackle this interesting problem
The renal pelvis
Mammals and birds are the only vertebrates known to produce a concentrated urine by means of renal medullary countercurrent systems. These two countercurrent systems, however, exhibit functional and anatomical differences which appear to be related to the fact that mammals are ureotelic while birds are uricotelic. In mammalian kidneys, urea accumulation in the medulla plays an important role in the concentrating mechanism. In bird kidneys, there is no accumulation of urea in the medulla. The mammalian renal medulla is surrounded by a muscular, funnel–shaped pelvic wall, leaving an elaborate urinary space between the renal medulla and the inside of the pelvic wall, while the bird renal medulla is surrounded by tight sheets of connective tissue leaving no space for the urine to contact the renal medulla. The mammalian renal pelvis makes it possible for urine to contact the epithelial covering of the inner and outer medulla, and the peristaltic contractions of the muscular pelvic wall exerts a rhythmic pumping action on the renal papilla. The functional significance of these two aspects of the renal pelvis have in recent years become the focus of attention by some renal physiologists
Organic and conventional public food procurement for youth in Denmark
This report is the first mapping of the activities and state-of-the-art on public organic food procurement for youth. The report, on the Danish activities, comes together with similar reports from Finland, Italy and Norway. These four reports will inform a comparative analysis conducted by DTU in workpackage 2 of the iPOPY project.
The major focus of the reports is school meals and the use of and potentials for organic products in this setting. But also other important settings than schools are included. The perspectives of the reports are on the policies and the policy processes influencing the extension of organic school meals.
The report is produced within the project “innovative Public Organic food Procurement for Youth”, iPOPY, and will be updated and revised during the project period (2007-2010)
Comparative physiology of desert mammals
Includes bibliographical references (page 31)
Hybrid solid state qubits: the powerful role of electron spins
We review progress on the use of electron spins to store and process quantum
information, with particular focus on the ability of the electron spin to
interact with multiple quantum degrees of freedom. We examine the benefits of
hybrid quantum bits (qubits) in the solid state that are based on coupling
electron spins to nuclear spin, electron charge, optical photons, and
superconducting qubits. These benefits include the coherent storage of qubits
for times exceeding seconds, fast qubit manipulation, single qubit measurement,
and scalable methods for entangling spatially separated matter-based qubits. In
this way, the key strengths of different physical qubit implementations are
brought together, laying the foundation for practical solid-state quantum
technologies.Comment: 54 pages, 7 figure
Nonparametric Modeling of Dynamic Functional Connectivity in fMRI Data
Dynamic functional connectivity (FC) has in recent years become a topic of
interest in the neuroimaging community. Several models and methods exist for
both functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and electroencephalography
(EEG), and the results point towards the conclusion that FC exhibits dynamic
changes. The existing approaches modeling dynamic connectivity have primarily
been based on time-windowing the data and k-means clustering. We propose a
non-parametric generative model for dynamic FC in fMRI that does not rely on
specifying window lengths and number of dynamic states. Rooted in Bayesian
statistical modeling we use the predictive likelihood to investigate if the
model can discriminate between a motor task and rest both within and across
subjects. We further investigate what drives dynamic states using the model on
the entire data collated across subjects and task/rest. We find that the number
of states extracted are driven by subject variability and preprocessing
differences while the individual states are almost purely defined by either
task or rest. This questions how we in general interpret dynamic FC and points
to the need for more research on what drives dynamic FC.Comment: 8 pages, 1 figure. Presented at the Machine Learning and
Interpretation in Neuroimaging Workshop (MLINI-2015), 2015 (arXiv:1605.04435
BioConcens: Biomass and bioenergy production agriculture – consequences for soil fertility, environment, spread of animal parasites and socio-economy
The research programme called “international research cooperation and organic integrity” was commenced for a period 2006-2010. It is coordinated by DARCOF (The Danish Research Centre for Organic Farming). The whole programme, with acronym DARCOF III, consists of 15 projects (http://www.darcof.dk/research/darcofiii/index.html). One of them is BIOCONCENS - Biomass and bioenergy production in organic farming – consequences for soil fertility, environment, spread of animal parasites and socio-economy (http://www.bioconcens.elr.dk/uk/). The production of bioenergy in organic agriculture (OA) can reduce its dependency of fossil fuels and decrease green house gasses emission; consequently it will increase sustainability of organic farms. Biorefinery concept based on co-production of biogas, bioethanol and protein fodder in organic farming will be developed within the BIOCONCENS project and the background for the project and the different work packages will be presented in this paper
Efficient classical simulation of slightly entangled quantum computations
We present a scheme to efficiently simulate, with a classical computer, the
dynamics of multipartite quantum systems on which the amount of entanglement
(or of correlations in the case of mixed-state dynamics) is conveniently
restricted. The evolution of a pure state of n qubits can be simulated by using
computational resources that grow linearly in n and exponentially in the
entanglement. We show that a pure-state quantum computation can only yield an
exponential speed-up with respect to classical computations if the entanglement
increases with the size n of the computation, and gives a lower bound on the
required growth.Comment: 4 pages. Major changes. Significantly improved simulation schem
Robust Trapped-Ion Quantum Logic Gates by Continuous Dynamical Decoupling
We introduce a novel scheme that combines phonon-mediated quantum logic gates
in trapped ions with the benefits of continuous dynamical decoupling. We
demonstrate theoretically that a strong driving of the qubit decouples it from
external magnetic-field noise, enhancing the fidelity of two-qubit quantum
gates. Moreover, the scheme does not require ground-state cooling, and is
inherently robust to undesired ac-Stark shifts. The underlying mechanism can be
extended to a variety of other systems where a strong driving protects the
quantum coherence of the qubits without compromising the two-qubit couplings.Comment: Slightly longer than the published versio
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