Slow wave sleep (SWS) has been identified as the sleep stage involved in consolidating newly acquired information. A growing body of evidence has shown that delta (1-4 Hz) oscillatory activity, the characteristic electroencephalographic signature of SWS, is involved in coordinating interaction between the hippocampus and the neocortex and is thought to take a role in stabilizing memory traces r...

We recorded 872 single units across the complete sleep-waking cycle in the mouse preoptic area (POA) and basal forebrain (BFB), which are deeply involved in the regulation of sleep and wakefulness (W). Of these, 552 were sleep-active, 96 were waking-active, 106 were active during both waking and paradoxical sleep (PS), and the remaining 118 were state-indifferent. Among the 872, we distinguishe...

UNLABELLED Patients with obstructive sleep apnoea (OSA) have reduced event rates during slow wave sleep (SWS) compared with stage 2 sleep. To explore this phenomenon, ventilatory and arousal timing responses to partial and complete airflow obstruction during SWS versus stage 2 sleep were examined. METHODS Ten patients, mean+/-SD apnoea-hypopnoea index (AHI) 49.7+/-16.5 events/h with reduced O...

To determine the site of action of the sleep-promoting effect of interleukin-1 (IL-1), we continuously infused (between 11 P.M. and 5 A.M.) murine recombinant IL-1beta into seven different locations in the ventricular and subarachnoid systems of the brain in freely moving rats. When IL-1 was infused at 10 ng/6 hr into the subarachnoid space underlying the ventral surface of the rostral basal fo...

BACKGROUND Pigs play a key epidemiologic role in the ecology of influenza A viruses (IAVs) emerging from animal hosts and transmitted to humans. Between 2008 and 2010, we investigated the health risk of occupational exposure to swine influenza viruses (SIVs) in Italy, during the emergence and spread of the 2009 H1N1 pandemic (H1N1pdm) virus. METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS Serum samples from 1...

PURPOSE Sonodynamic therapy is a developing noninvasive modality for cancer treatment, based on the selective activation of a sonosensitizer agent by acoustic cavitation. The activated sonosensitizer agent might generate reactive oxygen species leading to cancer cell death. We investigated the potential poly-methyl methacrylate core-shell nanoparticles (NPs) loaded with meso-tetrakis (4-sulfona...

Service-oriented computing has brought special attention to service modeling, especially in connection with semantic technologies. The expected proliferation of publicly accessible services (both WS–∗ services based on WSDL and SOAP, and RESTful services — including Web APIs — based on native Web technologies) will necessitate tool support and automation. The research on Semantic Web Service (S...

Studies on sine-wave speech (SWS) perception suggest that formants contain sufficient information for sentence intelligibility. This study further investigated the effects of amplitude modulation, number of sine-waves, and vowel resonance in SWS recognition. Results showed that Mandarin sentences synthesized using frequency trajectories of the first two formants were highly intelligible with ad...

Semantic Web Services (SWS) hold a lot of potential to the future of the Semantic Web. In this area, a number of tools have been developed to facilitate their definition and deployment. Our goal is to support an efficient means of testing and integration within a browser-based solution. For this purpose we propose JAWS (Javascript, AJAX, Web Service) : A Javascript API to facilitate the testing...

We report on an optical noncontact method for the detection of soft-tissue tumors based on the measurement of their elasticity. A focused air-puff system is used to excite surface waves (SWs) on soft tissues with transient static pressure. A high-speed phase-sensitive optical coherence tomography system is used to measure the SWs as they propagate from the point of excitation. To evaluate the s...