BACKGROUND Guarding pain after rat plantar incision is similar to pain at rest in postoperative patients. Spontaneous activity (SA) in nociceptive pathways quite likely transmits such ongoing pain. This study examined the extent of tissue injury by incision on pain behaviors and nociceptor SA. METHODS Rat pain behaviors were measured after a sham procedure, skin incision, or skin plus deep ti...

BACKGROUND Nerve injury and consequent inflammatory responses produced by surgical incision result in a complicated pain status which still affects half of all surgical patients. Therefore, it is essential for anesthesiologists to identify the mechanisms of postoperative pain. Mast cells are resident cells of connective tissue and the mucosa that participate in the immune response. Degranulatio...

This paper describes a database management system (DBMS) modified to use hardware write protection to guard critical DBMS data structures against software errors. Guarding (write-protecting) DBMS data improves software reliability by providing quick detection of corrupted pointers and array bounds overruns. Guarding will be especially helpful in an extensible DBMS since it limits the power of e...

Precopulatory guarding in Crustacea is usually analyzed as a male decision problem. We suggest an alternative possibility that precopula is established as a result of intersexual conflict over precopula duration. Such a conflict can be expected when the male optimum for precopula duration exceeds the female optimum. As a result, males should start precopulatory attempts earlier, while females s...

Social behavior of the prairie vole, Microtus ochrogaster, including monogamy, mate guarding, philopatry, communal nesting, and territoriality, evolved as an adaptation to habitats with low food prevalent in the original range of the species. These behaviors are associated with low population densities and low amplitudes of fluctuation characteristic of low food habitats. In particular, reprodu...

We describe a polynomial time O(k log log OPTk(P ))approximation algorithm for the k-guarding problem of finding a minimum number, OPTk(P ), of vertex guards of an n-vertex simple polygon P so that for every point p ∈ P , the number of guards that see p is at least the minimum of k and the number of vertices that see p. Our approach finds O ( k ε log log 1 ε ) size (k, ε)-nets for instances of ...

Securing a potential mate is one of the most important processes in sexual reproduction of animals. Intertidal copepods of the genus Tigriopus show mate-guarding behavior where a male captures a female and continues to clasp her for up to two weeks prior to copulation. Although these copepods form a mate-guarding pair between a male and a female with high accuracy, interactions between the sexe...

We present two new versions of the chromatic art gallery problem that can improve upper bound of the required colors pretty well. In our version, we employ restricted angle guards so that these modern guards can visit α-degree of their surroundings. If α is between 0 and 180 degree, we demonstrate that the strong chromatic guarding number is constant. Then we use orthogonal 90-degree guards for...

In this paper we evaluate the effects of guarded (or conditional, or predicated) execution on the performance of an instruction level parallel processor employing dynamic branch prediction. First, we assess the utility of guarded execution, both qualitatively and quantitatively, using a variety of application programs. Our assessment shows that guarded execution significantly increases the oppo...