Several fungal plant pathogens induce 'pseudoflowers' on their hosts to facilitate insect-mediated transmission of gametes and spores. When spores must be transmitted to host flowers to complete the fungal life cycle, we predict that pseudoflowers should evolve traits that mimic flowers and attract the most effective vectors in the flower-visiting community. We quantified insect visitation to f...

To investigate how the sweating response to a sustained handgrip exercise depends on changes in the exercise intensity, the sweating response to exercise was measured in eight healthy male subjects. Each subject lay in the supine position in a climatic chamber (35 degrees C and 50% relative humidity) for approximately 60 min. This exposure caused sudomotor activation by increasing skin temperat...

BACKGROUND Variable adherence limits effectiveness of daily oral and intravaginal tenofovir-containing pre-exposure prophylaxis. Monthly vaginal antiretroviral rings are one approach to improve adherence and drug delivery. METHODS MTN-013/IPM 026, a multisite, double-blind, randomized, placebo-controlled trial in 48 HIV-negative US women, evaluated vaginal rings containing dapivirine (DPV) (2...

Maraviroc (MVC), a specific antagonist of CCR5 expressed on macrophages and activated T cells, may modulate inflammation and may be useful in patients with HIV infection. In this study we used nonhuman primates to examine the effect and mechanism of MVC alone or in combination with cyclosporine (CsA) to prolong cardiac allograft survivals. In an established rhesus monkey cardiac allograft model...

It is not fully clear whether intramuscular oxidative metabolism contributes to total adenosine triphosphate (ATP) production during forearm isometric exercise at varying intensities. We tested hypothesis that oxidative metabolism with intramuscular O2 contributes to lessen the dependence on anaerobic metabolism, in particular phosphocreatine (PCr) breakdown. Seven male subjects were tested for...

The present study was designed to determine whether fatigue alters the ability to estimate an index of individual muscle force from shear elastic modulus measurements (experiment I), and to test the ability of this technique to highlight changes in load sharing within a redundant muscle group during an isometric fatiguing task (experiment II). Twelve subjects participated in experiment I, which...

Previous studies suggested that activity-dependent conduction block (CB) contributes to weakness in multifocal motor neuropathy (MMN). Obtaining more robust evidence for activity-dependent CB is important because it may be a novel target for treatment strategies. We performed nerve conduction studies in 22 nerve segments of 19 MMN patients, before and immediately after 60 seconds of maximal vol...

The large volume principle proposed by Vladimir Vapnik, which advocates that hypotheses lying in an equivalence class with a larger volume are more preferable, is a useful alternative to the large margin principle. In this paper, we introduce a clustering model based on the large volume principle called maximum volume clustering (MVC), and propose two algorithms to solve it approximately: a sof...

Surface electromyographic activity (sEMG) of the biceps brachii (BB) during weak elbow flexion has been reported to immediately increase after strong even while exerting consistent force; this phenomenon is called “post-contraction potentiation” (PCP). To determine whether central nervous system involved in PCP, we investigated effect transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) and magnetic ...

In Saudi Arabia, air conditioning is the main consumer of electricity, and increasing its energy efficiency great importance for conservation carbon footprint reduction. This study presents evaluation a hybrid indirect evaporative cooling-mechanical vapor compression (IEC-MVC) cycle cooling applications in Arabia. Most cities this country are characterized by high sensible demand, few near coas...