The depth to which seawater and fresh water circulate through modern carbonate platforms may be estimated with Sr/Sr isotope ratios of dissolved Sr that is enriched through carbonate mineral dissolution and recrystallization. In 23 water samples from onshore San Salvador Island and Long Island, Bahamas, carbonate mineral dissolution and aragonite-to-calcite transformations elevate Sr concentrat...

Identifying sources of sampling variation and quantifying their magnitude is critical to the interpretation of ecological field data. Yet, most monitoring programs of reef fish populations based on underwater visual censuses (UVC) consider only a few of the factors that may influence fish counts, such as the diver or census methodology. Recent studies, however, have drawn attention to a broader...

Longitudinal tubules and junctional sarcoplasmic reticulum (SR) were prepared from heart muscle microsomes by Ca2+-phosphate loading followed by sucrose density gradient centrifugation. The longitudinal SR had a high Ca2+ loading rate (0.93 +/- 0.08 mumol.mg-1.min) which was unchanged by addition of ruthenium red. Junctional SR had a low Ca2+ loading rate (0.16 +/- 0.02 mumol.mg-1.min) which wa...

Solving a set of simultaneous linear equations is probably the most important topic in numerical methods. For solving linear equations, iterative methods are preferred over the direct methods specially when the coefficient matrix is sparse. The rate of convergence of iteration method is increased by using Successive Relaxation (SR) technique. But SR technique is very much sensitive to relaxatio...

The detailed analysis of angular dependence of the synchrotron radiation (SR) is presented. In particular, we analyze the angular dependence of the integral SR-intensity and peculiarities of the angular dependence of the first harmonics SR. Studying spectral SR-intensities, we have discovered their unexpected angular behavior, completely different from that of the integral SR-intensity. Namely,...

We describe our SemEval2012 shared Task 5 system in this paper. The system includes three cascaded components: the tagging semantic role phrase, the identification of semantic role phrase, phrase and frame semantic dependency parsing. In this paper, semantic role phrase is tagged automatically based on rules, and takes Conditional Random Fields (CRFs) as the statistical identification model of ...

The purpose of this study was to investigate the anti-cancer effects of Sophorae Radix (SR) and doxorubicin (DOX) in human gastric and colorectal adenocarcinoma cells. We used the human gastric and colorectal adenocarcinoma cell lines (MKN-45 and WIDR cells, respectively). We examined cell death by using the MTT(3-[4, 5-dimethylthiazol-2-yl]-2, 5- diphenyltetrazolium bromide) assay and the casp...

Advanced glycation end products (AGE) -modified proteins behave as active ligands for several receptors belonging to the scavenger receptor family. Scavenger receptor class B type I (SR-BI) was identified as the first high density lipoprotein (HDL) receptor that mediates selective uptake of HDL-cholesteryl esters (HDL-CE). This study investigated whether AGE proteins serve as ligands for SR-BI ...

The effects of the synthetic cannabinoid WIN 55,212-2 on heat-evoked firing of spinal wide dynamic range (WDR) neurons were examined in a rodent model of neuropathic pain. Fifty-eight WDR neurons (1 cell/animal) were recorded from the ipsilateral spinal dorsal horns of rats with chronic constriction injury (CCI) and sham-operated controls. Relative to sham-operated controls, neurons recorded in...

Myocardial contractility depends on Ca2+ release from and uptake into the sarcoplasmic reticulum (SR). The Ca2+ gradient between the SR matrix and the cytosol (SR Ca2+ gradient) is maintained by the SR Ca2+-ATPase using the free energy available from hydrolysis of ATP. The activity of the SR Ca2+-ATPase is not only dependent on the energy state of the cell but is also kinetically regulated by S...