Actinoporins constitute a family of α pore-forming toxins produced by sea anemones. The soluble fold these proteins consists β-sandwich flanked two α-helices. exert their activity specifically recognizing sphingomyelin at target membranes. Once there, they penetrate the membrane with N-terminal α-helices, process that leads to formation cation-selective pores. These pores kill cells provoking a...

The mechanical processes of the cardiac cycle generate vibratory and acoustic signals that are received on the chest wall. We describe signal processing and feature extraction methods utilizing these signals for continuous non-invasive monitoring of cardiac systolic function. Vibro-acoustic heart signals were acquired from eleven subjects during a routine pharmacological stress echocardiography...

—Since the advent of software defined networks (SDN), there have been many attempts to outsource the complex and costly local network functionality, i.e. the middlebox, to the cloud in the same way as outsourcing computation and storage. The privacy issues, however, may thwart the enterprises' willingness to adopt this innovation since the underlying configurations of these middleboxes may leak...

The different methods of the nanopatterning of polymer layers, UV laser ablation, plasma depositing technique, electrochemical deposition and soft lithography are discussed as methods of surface patterning. The different surface functionalities are described, especially the effects of increased surface hydrophobicity/ superhydrophobicity created by coating substrates with low surface energy mat...

The World Wide Web provides an increasingly powerful and popular publication mechanism. Web documents often contain a large number of images serving various different purposes. Identifying the functional categories of these images has important applications including information extraction, web mining, web page summarization and mobile access. This paper describes a study on the functional cate...

A new type of hierarchical fuzzy system (HFS), namely, Hierarchical Classifying-Type Fuzzy System (HCTFS), is developed and proposed in the paper. While the HCTFS enjoys the full benefits of a traditional HFS, one of which is to suppress the effects of the unwanted phenomenon, “the curse of dimensionality,” it also offers one great advantage that all rule strengths are preserved when passing th...

MapReduce is one of the programming models for processing large amount of data in cloud where resource allocation is one of the research areas since it is responsible for improving the performance of Hadoop. However the resource allocation can be further improved by focusing on a set of mechanisms, that includes the budget based HFS algorithm where the fast worker node is identified first based...

The aim of this study was to determine the effect of low levels of glutathione on post-thawed buck sperm quality. In this experiment, different concentrations of glutathione [0 (LG-0), 0.5 (LG-0.5), 1 (LG-1), 1.5 (LG-1.5), and 2 (LG-2) mM] were added in a soybean lecithin-based extender. A total of 16 ejaculates from four bucks were collected and pooled. Each pooled sample was divided into five...