Human children possess the ability to approximate numerical quantity nonverbally from a young age. Over the course of early childhood, children develop increasingly precise representations of numerical values, including a symbolic number system that allows them to conceive of numerical information as Arabic numerals or number words. Functional brain imaging studies of adults report that activit...

BACKGROUND For therapeutic usage of induced Pluripotent Stem (iPS) cells, to accomplish xeno-free culture is critical. Previous reports have shown that human embryonic stem (ES) cells can be maintained in feeder-free condition. However, absence of feeder cells can be a hostile environment for pluripotent cells and often results in karyotype abnormalities. Instead of animal feeders, human fibrob...

The long QT syndrome type 2 (LQT2) is inheritable life threatening arrhythmic disorder and one of the most common genetic variants in long QT syndrome. There are some indications for treatment of the patients with LQT2 but it is impossible to completely prevent fatal arrhythmia. To develop novel therapy for the patients with LQT2, it has been desired to generate diseasespecific and patient-spec...

OBJECTIVE To study the complementary value of information from functional capacity evaluation (FCE) for insurance physicians (IPs) who assess the physical work ability of claimants with long-term musculoskeletal disorders (MSD). METHOD A post-test only design was used in the context of disability claims. Twenty-eight IPs participated in the study. Claimants with MSD formed the patient populat...

when induced pluripotent stem (iPs) cells were first discovered in 2007 there was a huge interest.1,2 The iPs cell technique with a minimal number of embryonic transcription factors could turn skin or any other tissue directly into viable embryonic stem cells. it was amazing to able to so simply to turn mature adult cells back into embryonic stem cells. The discovery also avoided the most diffi...

Ischemic stroke is a leading cause of human death and disability while clinical treatments are limited. The adult brain possesses endogenous regenerative activities that may benefit tissue repair after stroke. Trophic factors such as stromal cell-derived factor 1 alpha (SDF-1α) are upregulated in the ischemic brain, which promote endogenous regeneration. The regenerative response, however, is n...

Induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells have been generated from mouse and human fibroblasts by the retroviral transduction of four transcription factors. However, the cell origins and molecular mechanisms of iPS cell induction remain elusive. This report describes the generation of iPS cells from adult mouse hepatocytes and gastric epithelial cells. These iPS cell clones appear to be equivalent t...

The recent development of induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cell technology brings cell and gene therapies to patients one large step closer to reality. Technical improvements in various research fields sometimes come together fortuitously, leading to approaches to treating disease. If iPS cell technology continues to progress smoothly as expected and is actually applied to patients, the next logi...

Ventriculo-arterial coupling is expressed as the ratio Emax/eam (maximum ventricular elastance/arterial elastance). Different areas under the end-systolic pressure-volume relation (ESPVR) are expressed in terms of Emax/eam. The explicit inclusion of the active force of the myocardium in the mathematical formalism describing the pressure-volume relation (PVR) leads to new insight into the mechan...