This report shows methods to fabricate polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) microfluidic systems for long-term (up to 10 day) cell culture. Undesired bubble accumulation in microfluidic channels abruptly changes the microenvironment of adherent cells and leads to the damage and death of cells. Existing bubble trapping approaches have drawbacks such as the need to pause fluid flow, requirement for extern...

BACKGROUND It is debated whether interferon-based therapy (IBT) would affect the incidence of active tuberculosis (TB) among hepatitis C virus (HCV) infected patients. Although some case reports have demonstrated a possible association, the results are currently inconclusive. Therefore, we conducted a nation-wide population study to investigate the incidence of active TB in HCV infected patient...

This paper introduces a method for the semi-automatic generation of grammar test items by applying Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques. Based on manually-designed patterns, sentences gathered from the Web are transformed into tests on grammaticality. The method involves representing test writing knowledge as test patterns, acquiring authentic sentences on the Web, and applying generati...

A great deal of work has been done of late on the statistical modeling of word similarity relations (cf.Schütze (1992), Lund and Burgess (1996) Landauer and Dumais (1997), Lin (1998), Turney (2001)). While this has largely been viewed as an engineering task (with the notable exception of much writing on Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA)), the relative success of different approaches to constructin...

The strongly bounded Turing reducibilities r = cl (computable Lipschitz reducibility) and r = ibT (identity bounded Turing reducibility) are defined in terms of Turing reductions where the use function is bounded by the identity function up to an additive constant and the identity function, respectively. We show that, for r = ibT, cl, every computably enumerable (c.e.) r-degree a > 0 has the an...

OBJECTIVE To detect the presence of antibodies to the proacrosin/acrosin system and to evaluate their effect on the sperm acrosomal protein activities in women consulting for infertility. DESIGN Retrospective study. SETTING Basic research laboratory. PATIENT(S) Recombinant proteins derived from human proacrosin (Rec-40, Rec-30, Rec-20, Rec-10) and recombinant human zona pellucida (ZP) gly...

The interaction between isatin-β-thiosemicarbazone (IBT) and calf thymus DNA (CT-DNA) was investigated in physiological buffer (pH 7.4) using Neutral Red (NR) dye as a spectral probe by UV–Vis absorption and fluorescence spectroscopy, as well as viscosity measurements. The IBT is stabilized by intercalation in the DNA ( K [IBT –DNA] =1.03×105 M−1), and displaces the NR dye from the NR–DNA comple...

Background and aims: Non-pharmaceutic approaches to the treatment of hoarding disorder (HD) use interventions based of cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT). Inference-based therapy (IBT) focuses on the doubts which form the basis of preoccupation in HD and deals with ego syntonic values in hoarding by exposing how the hoarding-self sabotages the authentic self. The objective was to establish if t...