This article is a summary of a lecture on cellular mechanotransduction that was presented at a symposium on "Cardiac Mechano-Electric Feedback and Arrhythmias" that convened at Oxford, England in April 2007. Although critical mechanosensitive molecules and cellular components, such as integrins, stretch-activated ion channels, and cytoskeletal filaments, have been shown to contribute to the res...

Vaccines have shown great success in treating and preventing tumors and infections, while adjuvants are always demanded to ensure potent immune responses. Polyethylenimine (PEI), as one of the well-studied cationic polymers, has been used as a transfection reagent for decades. However, increasing evidence has shown that PEI-based particles are also capable of acting as adjuvants. In this paper,...

This paper discusses the design and implementation of single phase PWM inverter using 8051 microcontroller. The main features of 8051 based PWM inverter are simpler design, low cost, maximum range of voltage control and compact in size. The designed PWM inverter is tested on various AC loads like AC motor and intensity control of incandescent lamp in a closed loop environment.

Recently, there have been increasing interests in inferring mirco-expression from facial image sequences. Due to subtle facial movement of micro-expressions, feature extraction has become an important and critical issue for spontaneous facial micro-expression recognition. Recent works used spatiotemporal local binary pattern (STLBP) for micro-expression recognition and considered dynamic textur...

The static pull-in instability of beam-type micro-electromechanical systems is theoretically investigated. Two engineering cases including cantilever and double cantilever micro-beam are considered. Considering the mid-plane stretching as the source of the nonlinearity in the beam behavior, a nonlinear size-dependent Euler-Bernoulli beam model is used based on a modified couple stress theory, c...

We present in this paper the findings of a study on the role of macroadaptation in conversational intelligent tutoring. Macro-adaptivity refers to a system’s capability to select appropriate instructional tasks for the learner to work on. Micro-adaptivity refers to a system’s capability to adapt its scaffolding while the learner is working on a particular task. We compared an intelligent tutori...

In this paper, dynamic behavior of a functionally graded cantilever micro-beam and its pull-in instability, subjected to simultaneous effects of a thermal moment and nonlinear electrostatic pressure, has been studied. It has been assumed that the top surface is made of pure metal and the bottom surface from a metal–ceramic mixture. The ceramic constituent percent of the bottom surface ranges fr...

For the assembly of multi micro objects in micromanipulation, the first task is to identify multi micro parts. We present an improved support vector machine algorithm, which employs invariant moments based edge extraction to obtain feature attribute and then presents a heuristic attribute reduction algorithm based on rough set’s discernibility matrix to obtain attribute reduction, with using su...

Micro-grid control is the key technology in the process of accessing micro-grid into regular grid. This paper summarizes several ways on coordination control in micro-grid and introduces some domestic researches on micro-grid control strategies. It is written on the basis of the achievements on micro-grid control in some developed countries and current situations on domestic micro-grid control....

The increasing use of micro-blogging as a marketing tool has increased research attention on usage and business value of enterprise micro-blogging. Based on research on information system (IS) usage and resourcebased view (RBV) theory, this study develops a model to reveal the mechanism of business value creation of enterprise micro-blogging. The model consists of metrics on micro-blogging usag...