Search results for "Versa"
showing 10 items of 1490 documents
Commentary: "Nitric oxide releases Cl(-) from acidic organelles in retinal amacrine cells".
2015
In their recent article (Krishnan and Gleason, 2015) Vijai Krishnan and Evanna Gleason investigate the cellular mechanisms underlying the shift in the GABA reversal potential upon application of nitric oxide (NO). Functional alteration in GABAergic signaling by alterations in the GABA reversal potential has been identified as an important mechanism of plasticity (Raimondo et al., 2012) and NO is clearly one key substance involved in plasticity (Prast and Philippu, 2001). Therefore, the investigation of the mechanisms behind the NO induced shift in GABAergic effects is an important issue. However, in my opinion the authors neglected a possible explanation of their observations in the discuss…
On Addressing the Challenges of Complex Stochastic Games Using “Representative” Moves
2018
The problem of achieving competitive game play in a board game, against an intelligent opponent, is a well-known and studied field of Artificial Intelligence (AI). This area of research has seen major breakthroughs in recent years, particularly in the game of Go. However, popular hobby board games, and particularly Trading Card Games, have unique qualities that make them very challenging to existing game playing techniques, partly due to enormous branching factors. This remains a largely unexamined domain and is the arena we operate in. To attempt to tackle some of these daunting requirements, we introduce the novel concept of “Representative” Moves (RMs). Rather than examine the complete l…
Cinematic images of nation-ness: Space, time and gender inYoung Eagles(Estonia) andLāčplēsis(Latvia)
2012
ABSTRACTIn this article, I analyse cinematic time and space and their interaction, in which nation-ness is articulated as a unifying identity in the epic films Lācplēsis/Bear-Slayer (Latvia, Aleksandrs Rusteiķis, 1930) and Noored Kotkad/Young Eagles (Estonia, Theodor Luts, 1927, digitally remastered in 2008). In discussing the timespace organization of nation-ness in these films, I address representations of the political ‘birth of a nation’ and modern national identity. I discuss the ways in which the narratives in Young Eagles and Lācplēsis re-claim a traditional gender binary, predicated on a splitting and differentiating relationship with Otherness, embodied in the sexual threat of male…
Identification and cloning of odorant binding proteins from the scarab beetle Phyllopertha diversa.
1999
Abstract Wehave identified, cloned, and characterized two odorant binding proteins from the pale brown chafer, Phyllopertha diversa. One of the proteins (OBP1, 116 amino acids long) showed high amino acid identity (>90%) to two previously identified PBPs from scarab beetles. The second protein (OBP2) showed limited sequence similarity to lepidopteran and dipteran OBPs, but contained only 133 amino acids. Both proteins showed the occurrence of six highly conserved cysteines; electrospray mass spectral data suggested they are all bound in three disulfide bonds. During purification, OBP2 separated into several isoforms; N-terminal amino acid sequencing and electrospray ionization mass spectrom…
FCA-Net: Adversarial Learning for Skin Lesion Segmentation Based on Multi-Scale Features and Factorized Channel Attention
2019
International audience; Skin lesion segmentation in dermoscopic images is still a challenge due to the low contrast and fuzzy boundaries of lesions. Moreover, lesions have high similarity with the healthy regions in terms of appearance. In this paper, we propose an accurate skin lesion segmentation model based on a modified conditional generative adversarial network (cGAN). We introduce a new block in the encoder of cGAN called factorized channel attention (FCA), which exploits both channel attention mechanism and residual 1-D kernel factorized convolution. The channel attention mechanism increases the discriminability between the lesion and non-lesion features by taking feature channel int…
Classifying G-graded algebras of exponent two
2019
Let F be a field of characteristic zero and let $$\mathcal{V}$$ be a variety of associative F-algebras graded by a finite abelian group G. If $$\mathcal{V}$$ satisfies an ordinary non-trivial identity, then the sequence $$c_n^G(\mathcal{V})$$ of G-codimensions is exponentially bounded. In [2, 3, 8], the authors captured such exponential growth by proving that the limit $$^G(\mathcal{V}) = {\rm{lim}}_{n \to \infty} \sqrt[n]{{c_n^G(\mathcal{V})}}$$ exists and it is an integer, called the G-exponent of $$\mathcal{V}$$ . The purpose of this paper is to characterize the varieties of G-graded algebras of exponent greater than 2. As a consequence, we find a characterization for the varieties with …
Generalized Riesz systems and quasi bases in Hilbert space
2019
The purpose of this article is twofold. First of all, the notion of $(D, E)$-quasi basis is introduced for a pair $(D, E)$ of dense subspaces of Hilbert spaces. This consists of two biorthogonal sequences $\{ \varphi_n \}$ and $\{ \psi_n \}$ such that $\sum_{n=0}^\infty \ip{x}{\varphi_n}\ip{\psi_n}{y}=\ip{x}{y}$ for all $x \in D$ and $y \in E$. Secondly, it is shown that if biorthogonal sequences $\{ \varphi_n \}$ and $\{ \psi_n \}$ form a $(D ,E)$-quasi basis, then they are generalized Riesz systems. The latter play an interesting role for the construction of non-self-adjoint Hamiltonians and other physically relevant operators.
Violation of the equivalence principle from light scalar dark matter
2018
In this paper, we study the local observational consequences of a violation of the Einstein Equivalence Principle induced by models of light scalar Dark Matter (DM). We focus on two different models where the scalar field couples linearly or quadratically to the standard model of matter fields. For both these cases, we derive the solutions of the scalar field. We also derive from first principles the expressions for two types of observables: (i) the local comparison of two atomic sensors that are differently sensitive to the constants of Nature and (ii) the local differential acceleration between two test-masses with different compositions. For the linear coupling, we recover that the signa…
Oxidative stress is associated with an increased antioxidant defense in elderly subjects: a multilevel approach.
2014
© 2014 Fonseca et al. Background: Studies of associations between plasma GSH-Px activity and cardiovascular risk factors have been done in humans, and contradictory results have been reported. The aim of our study was to assess the association between the scavenger antioxidant enzyme glutathione peroxidase (GSH-Px) activity in plasma and the presence of novel and classical cardiovascular risk factors in elderly patients. Copyright: Methods: We performed a cross-sectional study with baseline data from a subsample of the PREDIMED (PREvención con DIeta MEDiterránea) study in Spain. Participants were 1,060 asymptomatic subjects at high risk for cardiovascular disease (CVD), aged 55 to 80, selec…
A 14-item Mediterranean diet assessment tool and obesity indexes among high-risk subjects: the PREDIMED trial
2012
Objective Independently of total caloric intake, a better quality of the diet (for example, conformity to the Mediterranean diet) is associated with lower obesity risk. It is unclear whether a brief dietary assessment tool, instead of full-length comprehensive methods, can also capture this association. In addition to reduced costs, a brief tool has the interesting advantage of allowing immediate feedback to participants in interventional studies. Another relevant question is which individual items of such a brief tool are responsible for this association. We examined these associations using a 14-item tool of adherence to the Mediterranean diet as exposure and body mass index, waist circum…