In rat barrel cortex, development of layer 2/3 receptive fields can be disrupted by sensory deprivation, with a critical period ending around postnatal day (PND) 14. To determine if experience-dependent plasticity of dendritic morphology could contribute to the reorganization of synaptic inputs, we analyzed dendritic structure in acute brain slices using two-photon laser scanning microscopy (2P...

Spinal cord neurons cultured in vitro have been shown to respond to changes in their environment by means of 2 different types of neurite outgrowth: (1) neurite elongation and (2) emergence and branching of newly formed neurites. Culture of spinal cord neurons with heparan sulfate proteoglycan (HSPG) medium resulted in a 3-fold increase in neurite elongation compared to the control. Extensive b...

Lung branching morphogenesis has been studied for decades, but the underlying developmental mechanisms are still not fully understood. Cellular movements dynamically change during the branching process, but it is difficult to observe long-term cellular dynamics by in vivo or tissue culture experiments. Therefore, developing an in vitro experimental model of bronchial tree would provide an essen...

The gas-phase reaction of CCl+ with acetonitrile (CH3CN) is studied using a linear Paul ion trap coupled to time-of-flight mass spectrometer. This work builds on previous study the acetylene and further explores reactivity organic neutral molecules. Both reactant species are relevant in observations models chemistry interstellar medium (ISM). Nitriles, particular, noted for their relevance preb...

In this paper we explore the variation of sentences as a function of the sentence number. We demonstrate that while the entropy of the sentence increases with the sentence number, it decreases at the paragraph boundaries in accordance with the Entropy Rate Constancy principle (introduced in related work). We also demonstrate that the principle holds for different genres and languages and explor...

In this research, we extract paraphrases from Japanese Web news articles that are long and aimed at displaying on personal computer screens and mobile news articles that are short and compact and aimed at mobile terminals’ small screens. We have collected them for more than two years, and aligned them at article level and then at sentence level. As the result, we got more than 88,000 pairs of a...

Blood vessels and other anatomic objects in the human body can be described as trees of branching tubes. The focus of this paper is the extraction of the branching geometry in 3D, as well as the extraction of the tubes themselves via skeletons computed as cores. Cores are height ridges of a graded measure of medial strength called medialness, which measures how much a given location resembles t...

We present a method for solving service allocation problems in which a set of services must be allocated to a set of agents so as to maximize a global utility. The method is completely distributed so it can scale to any number of services without degradation. We first formalize the service allocation problem and then present a simple hill-climbing, a global hillclimbing, and a bidding-protocol ...

in this paper we introduce the notion of classical quasi-primary submodules that generalizes the concept of classical primary submodules. then, we investigate decomposition and minimal decomposition into classical quasi-primary submodules. in particular, existence and uniqueness of classical quasi-primary decompositions in finitely generated modules over noetherian rings are proved. moreover, w...