∗ James N. Collins, Stanford University, [email protected]. Acknowledgements: Thanks to Emily Sataua and Joey Zodiakal for their time as consultants. Data from these two consultants for this project was collected in 2013. Both consultants self-identify as speakers of American Samoa Samoan. Thanks also to Vince Schwenke-Enoka and Rev. Iakopo Leleimalefaga for additional judgements. Thanks to ...

Local medicinal plants from Madina, Saudi Arabia, are used to cure various diseases. However, some can cause adverse health effects. Five different medicinal plants were collected in the city of Madina: mahareeb (Cymbopogon), sheeh (Artemisia), harjal (Cynanchum argel delile), nabipoot (Equisetum), and kafmariam (Vitex agnus-castus). In total, four toxic elements including Al, Pb, As, and Cd we...

The posttraumatic proximal cross-union of the forearm in childhood is a rare complication after radial head, neck or proximal forearm fractures and elbow dislocations. There is no standardized treatment. Several surgical procedures with or without interposition techniques are described in the literature. The aim of this study was to analyze all children with cross-unions who underwent surgery o...

Ischemic stroke is the third leading cause of death in the world. Our previous study found that cynandione A (CYNA), the main component from the root of Cynanchum bungei, exhibits anti-ischemic stroke activity. In this work, we investigated the therapeutic mechanisms of CYNA to ischemic stroke at protein network level. First, PC12 cells and cerebellar granule neurons were prepared to validate t...

Diaspora ethnic communities differ in their readiness for mobilization on behalf of homeland interests. Using three ethnonational groups in the United States, each of which has ties to the Middle East, this paper develops and tests a multilevel model of politicized ethnic identity. The empirical analysis confirms that individuals differ in their readiness for mobilization based on the strength ...

A new phenolic compound, 2-O-β-laminaribiosyl-4-hydroxyacetophenone (1), was isolated from Cynanchi Wilfordii Radix (CWR, the root of Cynanchum wilfordii Hemsley), along with 10 known aromatic compounds, including cynandione A (2), bungeisides-C (7) and -D (8), p-hydroxyacetophenone (9), 2',5'-dihydroxyacetophenone (10), and 2',4'-dihydroxyacetophenone (11). The structure of the new compound (1...

Cynanchum is a large genus with some important medicinal species in China. The medicinal species in Cynanchum are easily confused, leading to potential safety risks. In this study, the internal transcribed spacer 2 (ITS2) barcode was used to discriminate the medicinal plants in Cynanchum. The identifying capability of ITS2 was assessed using the specific genetic divergence, BLAST1, neighbor-joi...

Caudatin is a potential antitumor agent isolated from the traditional Chinese medicine "baishouwu", which was the root tuber of Cynanchum auriculatum Royle ex Wight. In our previous studies, caudatin showed selectivity on human hepatoma cell line SMMC7721 among several different tumor cell lines, and further in vivo tests validated the inhibitory action of caudatin against hepatic cancer using ...

The electrocardiogram in ventricular septal defect has long been recognized as affording some ndication of the size of the defect and of the hmodynamic disturbance. In 1954, Wood, Magidson, nd Wilson reported that small defects and some defects of medium size had normal cardiograms, but that in larger defects evidence of both right and left ventricular enlargement was common. Dther workers have...

Motivated by the goal of establishing stochastic and information theoretic foundations for the study of intelligence and synthesis of intelligent machines, this thesis probes several topics relating to hidden state stochastic models. Finite Growth Models (FGM) are introduced. These are nonnegative functionals that arise from parametrically-weighted directed acyclic graphs and a tuple observatio...