To quantify the solute permeability of rat cerebral microvessels, we measured the apparent permeability (P) of pial microvessels to various sized solutes. The pial microcirculation was observed by a high numerical aperture objective lens through a section of the frontoparietal bone thinned with a micro-grinder (a revised method from Easton and Fraser, 1994, J Physiol. 475:147-157, 1994). Sodium...

Gamma Ray Burst (GRB) afterglows close to their peak intensity are among the brightest X-ray sources in the sky. Despite their fast power-law like decay, when fluxes are integrated from minutes up to hours after the GRB event, the corresponding number counts (logN-logF relation) far exceeds that of any other high redshift (z> 0.5) source, the flux of which is integrated over the same time inter...

BACKGROUND Cell-free foetal haemoglobin (HbF) has been shown to play a role in the pathology of preeclampsia (PE). In the present study, we aimed to further characterize the harmful effects of extracellular free haemoglobin (Hb) on the placenta. In particular, we investigated whether cell-free Hb affects the release of placental syncytiotrophoblast vesicles (STBMs) and their micro-RNA content. ...

We present the first gas dynamical simulations of the photoevaporation of cosmological minihalos overtaken by the ionization fronts which swept through the IGM during reionization in a ΛCDM universe, including the effects of radiative transfer. We demonstrate the phenomenon of I-front trapping inside minihalos, in which the weak, R-type fronts which traveled supersonically across the IGM decele...

We propose PolderCast, a P2P topic-based Pub/Sub system that is (a) fault-tolerant and robust, (b) scalable w.r.t the number of nodes interested in a topic and number of topics that nodes are interested in, and (c) fast in terms of dissemination latency while (d) attaining a low communication overhead. This combination of properties is provided by an implementation that blends deterministic pro...

Abundance measurements of the light elements lithium, beryllium, and boron are playing an increasingly important role in the study of stellar physics. Because these elements are easily destroyed in stars at temperatures (2–4) × 10K, the abundances in the surface convective zone are diagnostics of the star’s internal workings. Standard stellar models cannot explain depletion patterns observed in...

An identifying code in a graph G is a subset of vertices with the property that for each vertex v ∈ V (G), the collection of elements of C at distance at most 1 from v is non-empty and distinct from the collection of any other vertex. We consider the minimum density d(Sk) of an identifying code in the square grid Sk of height k (i.e. with vertex set Z × {1, . . . , k}). Using the Discharging Me...