If an aspirate is not obtainable once the NGT is sited, performing the whoosh test is a valuable means to assess the likelihood of the NGT being in the stomach or not. If a positive whoosh test is heard, then a chest radiograph (CXR) can be requested. If the whoosh test is negative, then there is little point in requesting a CXR as the probability of the NGT being in the stomach is very low (in...

OBJECTIVE Knowledge of accurate airway length (AL) enables safer placement of the endotracheal tube (ETT) in the trachea. Our objective was to check the safety of a new formula (Touch and Read method) to determine ETT depth. METHODS AL was measured in 176 patients. Patients were divided into a normal group (AL >25 cm in men, >23 cm in women) and a risk group (AL ≤25 cm in men, ≤23cm in women)...

The severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) epidemic brought into the spotlight the need for rapid development of effective anti-viral drugs against newly emerging viruses. Researchers have leveraged the 20-year battle against AIDS into a variety of possible treatments for SARS. Most prominently, based solely on viral genome information, silencers of viral genes, viral-enzyme blockers and vira...

Molecular dynamics simulations of protein folding or unfolding, unlike most in vitro experimental methods, are performed on a single molecule. The effects of neighboring molecules on the unfolding/folding pathway are largely ignored experimentally and simply not modeled computationally. Here, we present two all-atom, explicit solvent molecular dynamics simulations of 32 copies of the Engrailed ...

THE Albemarle Committee put for7" ward the idea of adolescents as the ^tmus paper of a society, thus suggesting that to understand the problems ?f the adolescents would be to see something of the larger problems of society in which they find themselves. The authors of Teenage Tyranny,1 tv^o American journalists with a sPecial interest in educational matters, jake a hard, realistic look at the "...

Objective: To describe filling patterns and associated transcriptional aspects in phlebotomy tubes received at PNS Rahat laboratory. Material and Methods: This descriptive study was carried out from November 2006 to August 2007 at Department of Pathology, PNS Rahat, Karachi. Phlebotomy related data was collected from various blood collection tubes and associated request/authorization forms from...

Objective Eustachian tube (ET) dysfunction is most frequently caused by a failure of the ET to adequately open; however, there is currently no reliable method of assessing this. Tubomanometry has recently shown good interindividual repeatability as a measure of ET function by measuring middle ear pressure after the application of regulated nasopharyngeal pressures during swallowing. We present ...

Gene duplication provides an organism with a rich source of genetic material for tinkering by selection during evolution. In this issue, Rancati et al. (2008) report that extensive polyploidy and aneuploidy are the initial evolutionary changes in yeast selected in vitro to overcome defects resulting from the loss of a myosin II protein crucial for normal cytokinesis.

A longstanding challenge in studies of neurodegenerative disease has been that the pathologic protein aggregates in live tissue are not amenable to structural and kinetic analysis by conventional methods. The situation is put in focus by the current progress in demarcating protein aggregation in vitro, exposing new mechanistic details that are now calling for quantitative in vivo comparison. In...