INTRODUCTION The aims of these studies were to identify the cytokine and chemokine expression profile of nucleus pulposus (NP) cells and to determine the relationships between NP cell cytokine and chemokine production and the characteristic tissue changes seen during intervertebral disc (IVD) degeneration. METHODS Real-time q-PCR cDNA Low Density Array (LDA) was used to investigate the expres...

INTRODUCTION Loss of intervertebral disc (IVD) matrix and ultimately disc height as a result of 'degeneration' has been implicated as a major cause of low back pain (LBP). The use of anabolic growth factors as therapies to regenerate IVD matrix, hence restoring disc height and thus reversing degenerative disc disease, has been suggested. Cartilage-derived morphogenetic protein (CDMP) is a growt...

Strong gravitational lensing and stellar dynamics provide two complementary and orthogonal constraints on the density profiles of galaxies. Based on spherically symmetric, scale-free, mass models, it is shown that the combination of both techniques is powerful in breaking the mass-sheet and mass-anisotropy degeneracies. Second, observational results are presented from the Lenses Structure & Dyn...

The accelerating expansion of the universe suggests that an unknown component with strongly negative pressure, called dark energy, currently dominates the dynamics of the universe. Such a component makes up ∼ 70% of the energy density of the universe yet has not been predicted by the standard model of particle physics. The best method for exploring the nature of this dark energy is to map the r...

We extract, from a quark model potential that reproduces the number and ordering of nonstrange baryonic resonances up to 2.3 GeV, the quantum numbers for the dominant configurations in the ground and first non-radial excited states. From the pattern of quantum numbers we identify, from data, spectral regularities that allow us to predict the expected high spin low-lying spectrum from 2.3 to 3.0...

We show that triangulating a set of points with elevations such that the number of local minima of the resulting terrain is minimized is NP-hard for degenerate point sets. The same result applies when there are no degeneracies for higher-order Delaunay triangulations. Two heuristics are presented to minimize the number of local minima for higher-order Delaunay triangulations, and they are compa...

We derive the equations of Gauss and Weingarten for a non-degenerate hypersurface of a semi-Riemannian manifold admitting a semi-symmetric metric connection, and give some corollaries of these equations. In addition, we obtain the equations of Gauss curvature and Codazzi-Mainardi for this non-degenerate hypersurface and give a relation between the Ricci and the scalar curvatures of a semi-Riema...

We propose a second order finite volume scheme for nonlinear degenerate parabolic equations. For some of these models (porous media equation, drift-diffusion system for semiconductors, ...) it has been proved that the transient solution converges to a steady-state when time goes to infinity. The present scheme preserves steady-states and provides a satisfying long-time behavior. Moreover, it re...

The inputs that satisfy these assumptions may be said to be non-degenerate; otherwise they are degenerate. Implementors are left to their own devices to handle degenerate cases. Some papers may not even list the degenerate inputs. Thus, Forrest [2] deplores the “plethora of special cases ... glossed over by theoretical algorithms”. Forrest, and also Sedgewick [6], calls this the “bugbear” of ge...