Pelvic organ prolapse (POP) is a common disorder that can disturb the health and quality of life of females. However, the basic pathophysiology and underlying mechanism of POP are not fully understood. Matrix metalloproteinases (MMPs) and tissue inhibitors of metalloproteinases (TIMPs) have been reported to be associated with the onset and development of POP. In the present study, to characteri...

Visual search studies with adults have shown that stimuli that contain a unique perceptual feature pop out from dissimilar distractors and are unaffected by the number of distractors. Studies with very young infants have suggested that they too might exhibit pop-out. However, infant studies have used paradigms in which pop-out is measured in seconds or minutes, whereas in adults pop-out occurs ...

Visual “pop-out” occurs when a unique visual target (e.g. a feature singleton) is present among a set of homogeneous distractors. However, the role of visual awareness in this process remains unclear. Here we show that, even though subjects were not aware of a suppressed pop-out display, their subsequent performance on an orientation discrimination task was significantly better at the pop-out l...

In Caenhorabtidis elegans embryos, the nuclei of sister cells that are born from anterior/posterior divisions show an invariant high/low asymmetry, respectively, in their level of the transcription factor POP-1. Previous studies have shown that POP-1 asymmetry between the daughters of an embryonic cell called EMS results in part from a Wnt-like signal provided by a neighboring cell, called P(2)...

We aimed to evaluate whether the use of a speculum blade modifies the evaluation of pelvic organ prolapse (POP) as assessed by dynamic magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). Twenty-seven women with POP Quantification (POPQ) stage II or greater, scheduled for POP surgery, were evaluated using MRI. The procedure was repeated using the posterior blade of a standard plastic Grave's speculum to successiv...

Pelvic organ prolapse (POP) is a common, debilitating disorder affecting millions of women. Uterosacral ligaments (USLs) are the main supportive structures of the uterus and vagina and are often attenuated in women with POP. Although the mechanical strength of USLs is known to be dependent on collagen synthesis and catabolism and the degradation protein MMP2 has been implicated in POP, the mole...

BACKGROUND Evidence is emerging that exposure to persistent organic pollutants (POP) is a risk factor for atherosclerosis-related diseases and for diabetes mellitus (DM). We hypothesized that residential proximity to sources of POP will be associated with an increase in hospitalization rates for ischemic stroke (IS) with comorbid DM (IS-DM). METHODS We examined IS-DM hospitalization rates in ...

We review recent 3D cosmological hydrodynamic simulations of primordial star formation from cosmological initial conditions (Pop III.1) and from initial conditions that have been altered by radiative feedback from stellar sources (Pop III.2). We concentrate on simulations that resolve the formation of the gravitationally unstable cloud cores in mini-halos over the mass range 105 < M/M⊙ < 107 an...

Canonical Wnt signaling converts the TCF/LEF transcription factor from repressor to activator by increasing nuclear levels of its coactivator, beta-catenin. A striking exception had been reported for Wnt-induced endoderm formation during C. elegans embryogenesis. It has long been believed that transcriptional activation of Wnt target genes in the endoderm precursor occurred due to a lowering of...

Visual pop-out occurs when a unique visual target (e.g., a feature singleton) is present in a set of homogeneous distractors. However, the role of visual awareness in this process remains unclear. In the experiments reported here, we showed that even though subjects were not aware of a suppressed pop-out display, their subsequent performance on an orientationdiscrimination task was significantl...