Heterogeneity in narrowing among individual airways is an important contributor to airway hyperresponsiveness. This paper investigates the contribution of longitudinal heterogeneity (the variability along the airway in cross-sectional area and shape) to airway resistance (R(aw)). We analyzed chest high-resolution computed tomography scans of 8 asthmatic (AS) and 9 nonasthmatic (NA) subjects bef...

BACKGROUND Numerous studies suggest setting positive end-expiratory pressure during conventional ventilation according to the static pressure-volume (P-V) curve, whereas data on how to adjust mean airway pressure (P(aw)) during high-frequency oscillatory ventilation (HFOV) are still scarce. The aims of the current study were to (1) examine the respiratory and hemodynamic effects of setting P(aw...

The combined effect of water activity (aw) and pH on growth and toxin production by Clostridium botulinum type G strain 89 was investigated. The minimum aw at which growth and toxin formation occurred was 0.965, for media in which the pH was adjusted with either sodium chloride or sucrose. The minimum pH (at the optimum aw) for growth and toxin production of C. botulinum type G was found to be ...

A major prediction of the elementary coordination dynamics of two contralateral limb segments in 1 : 1 frequency locking was tested. A shift in stable steady-state relative phase C#I from 0 and ST radians is induced by a difference Aw in the uncoupled frequencies of the segments. The elementary coordination dynamics, an order parameter equation in 4, predicts that equilibrium shift will be a th...

Here, it is found that dark energy and dark matter emerge from the gravitational sector, if non-linear term of scalar curvature is added to Einstein-Hilbert lagrangian. An equation of state for dark energy, having the form pde = −ρde + f(a) (with pde(ρde) being the pressure (density) for dark energy, f(a) being a function of scale factor a(t) and t being the cosmic time) is explored. Interestin...

UNLABELLED Indoor fungi cause damage in houses and are a potential threat to human health. Indoor fungal growth requires water, for which the terms water activity (aw) and relative humidity (RH) are used. The ability of the fungi Aspergillus niger, Cladosporium halotolerans, and Penicillium rubens at different developmental stages to survive changes in aw dynamics was studied. Fungi grown on me...

Adaptively weighted Sub-pattern PCA (Aw-SpPCA) for face recognition is presented in this paper. Unlike PCA based on a whole image pattern, Aw-SpPCA operates directly on its sub-patterns partitioned from an original whole pattern and separately extracts features from them. Moreover, unlike both SpPCA and mPCA that neglect different contributions made by different parts of the human face in face ...

To evaluate the hypothesis that increasing the potential for glycolytic metabolism would benefit the functioning of infarcted myocardium, we investigated whether mild exercise training would increase the activities of oxidative enzymes, expression of carbohydrate-related transport proteins (monocarboxylate transporter MCT1 and glucose transporter GLUT4), and myosin heavy chain (MHC) isoforms. M...

The influence of reduced water activity (aw) on lactose metabolism by Lactococcus lactis subsp. cremoris 2254 and 2272 was studied at different pH values. In control incubations (aw, 0.99) with nongrowing cells in pH-controlled phosphate buffer, the levels of carbon recovered as L-(+)-lactate were 92% at pH 6.1 and 5.3 and 78% at pH 4.5. However, the levels of recovery decreased to approximatel...

AIMS To evaluate the influence of environmental parameters (water activity aw, temperature, and pH) on the radial growth rate of Trichoderma asperellum (strains PR10, PR11, PR12, and 659-7), an antagonist of Phytophthora megakarya, the causal agent of cocoa black pod disease. METHODS AND RESULTS The radial growth of four strains of T. asperellum was monitored for 30 days on modified PDA mediu...