OBJECTIVES The aim of this study was to verify the anticariogenic effect of acidulate solutions with low NaF concentration, using pH-cycling model and bovine enamel. MATERIAL AND METHODS Enamel blocks were submitted to the surface microhardness (SMH) test and randomly divided in 12 experimental and one placebo groups. The blocks were submitted to pH cycling for 7 days, with daily applications...

Soon after the term mutant prevention concentration (MPC) was coined to define the MIC of the least susceptible mutant subpopulation of a microbial culture (2), we noticed that MPCs and MICs correlated poorly (r 2 0.39) for a set of closely related fluoroquinolones when determined with Mycobacterium smegmatis (9). Subsequently, isolated examples were described in which correlation was low for a...

Taste is a property that is thought to potentially modulate swallowing behavior. Whether such effects depend on taste, intensity remains unclear. This study explored differences in the amplitudes of tongue-palate pressures in swallowing as a function of taste stimulus concentration. Tongue-palate pressures were collected in 80 healthy women, in two age groups (under 40, over 60), stratified by ...

OBJECTIVE To investigate the effect of serum culture conditions on the differentiation of hepatic progenitor cells (HPCs) in vitro. METHODS This study was conducted at the Stem Cell Biology and Therapy Laboratory, The Children's Hospital of Chongqing Medical University, Chongqing, China from August 2009 to June 2010. Differentiation of HPCs was induced with dexamethasone, hepatic growth facto...

The static and dynamic response associated with a low concentration x of static defects in a Heisenberg antiferromagnet at zero temperature is analyzed within linearized spin-wave theory via a boson formalism involving a non-Hermitian potential. We obtain the dispersion relation for long-wavelength spin waves in the form ω(q)=c(x)q+iγ(x)qτ. Our results for c(x) agree with previous work and, in ...

We consider the problem of approximately reconstructing a partially-observed, approximately low-rank matrix. This problem has received much attention lately, mostly using the trace-norm as a surrogate to the rank. Here we study low-rank matrix reconstruction using both the trace-norm, as well as the less-studied max-norm, and present reconstruction guarantees based on existing analysis on the R...

A 2014 national assessment of salt iodization coverage in Cambodia found that 62% of samples were non-iodized, suggesting a significant decline in daily iodine intakes. The Cambodian Micronutrient Survey conducted in 2014 (CMNS-2014) permitted obtaining national data on urinary iodine concentrations (UIC) to assess iodine status and whether iodized salt use had an impact. Urine samples were col...