Strong gap-junctional coupling can synchronize the electrical oscillations of cells, but we show, in a theoretical model, that weak coupling can phase lock two cells 180 degrees out-of-phase. Antiphase oscillations can exist in parameter regimens where in-phase oscillations break down. Some consequences are (i) coupling two excitable cells leads to pacemaking, (ii) coupling two pacemaker cells ...

We present a disposable, normally closed, non-contact dispensing valve for the sub-μL range. The miniaturized solenoid valve (diameter: 8 mm, height: 27.25 mm) is compatible to standard Luer-Lock interfaces. A highly dynamic actuation principle enables opening times down to 1 ms. The dispensing performance was evaluated for water (η = 1.03 mPas) and a 66% (w/w) glycerol/water solution (η = 16.9...

A PLL circuit includes phase detector for detecting phase error between an input and output signal of the PLL circuit and outputting pump up and pump down signal. A charge pump generates a charge pump signal in response to pump up and pump down signals. A loop filter filters charge pump signal to generate a filtered signal. A boost-up device coupled to loop filter output terminal charges a loop...

The idea of data transfer by physically severed connections has been applied in a simple realization of the Lock-Keeper technology, the SingleGate Lock Keeper system. By means of it, the possibility of direct attacks to a protected network can be eliminated entirely and data can be exchanged between two networks through a completely secure and reliable way. As an advanced implementation of this...

The exibility of nested transactions is generally provided at the expense of a more complex locking mechanism which must deal with expensive lock inheritance. In this paper, we give a solution for eecient lock inheritance. Our solution does not change the original nested transactions model but does revisit its locking rules using set-oriented semantics. This allows us to trade the cost of lock ...

The choice of lock objects in concurrent programs can affect both performance and correctness, a burden of complexity for programmers. Recently, various automated lock allocation and assignment techniques have been proposed, each aiming primarily to minimize the number of conflicts between critical sections. However, practical performance depends on a number of important factors, including the ...

There are many mechanisms for concurrency control in high-level programming languages. In Java, the original mechanism for concurrency control, based on synchronized blocks, is lexically scoped. For more flexible control, Java 5 introduced non-lexical operators, supporting lock primitives on re-entrant locks. These operators may lead to run-time errors and unwanted behavior; e.g., taking a lock...

We surveyed infectious diseases physicians to determine their practice patterns with regard to both antimicrobial lock prophylaxis and antimicrobial lock therapy. Antimicrobial lock prophylaxis is relatively uncommon; only 19% of infectious diseases physicians reported using it at least once. Although antimicrobial lock therapy is more commonly used, we found a significant variation in practice...

In this paper we analyze the performance of concurrent redblack trees using two HTM implementations, Intel’s Transactional Synchronization Extensions (TSX) on Haswell processors and IBM’s Power8 HTM. We parallelize bottom-up and top-down red-black trees using coarse-grained transactions and evaluate their performance. Our experimental results show that HTM can outperform lock-based implementati...

We show a method for parallelizing top down dynamic programs in a straightforward way by a careful choice of a lock-free shared hash table implementation and randomization of the order in which the dynamic program computes its subproblems. This generic approach is applied to dynamic programs for knapsack, shortest paths, and RNA structure alignment, as well as to a state-of-the-art solution for...