Diet carbonated soft drinks were introduced to help consumers lower caloric intake. However, critics suggest that these can provide an excuse consume more calories, a so-called “Big Mac and Coke” mentality is consistent with behavioral theories such as moral licensing (e.g., combining healthy eating choice indulgent, less one). Using individual-level food drink consumer panel data from major fa...

Crystal size distribution (CSD) in metamorphic rocks provide fundamental information about crystal nucleation and growth rate, growth time and the degree of overstepping. CSD data for garnet, staurolite, kyanite and andalusite crystals from the aureole demonstrate that the earliest formed of these minerals, garnet, has the highest population density and the shortest growth time. The last formed...

The diagnostic value of the detection of immunoglobulin G (IgG) and IgM by Bartonella henselae-based indirect fluorescence assay (IFA) and enzyme-linked immunoassay (EIA) for the diagnosis of cat scratch disease (CSD) was evaluated. The IFA was performed either with B. henselae that was cocultivated for a few hours with Vero cells or with noncocultivated B. henselae as the antigen. Additionally...

Stress contributes to a variety of diseases and disorders such as depression and peptic ulcer. The present study aimed to investigate the correlation between stress ulcer and depression in pathogenesis and treatment by using chronic stress depression (CSD), chronic psychological stress ulcer (CPSU) and water immersion restrain stress models in rats. Our data showed that the ulcer index of the a...

The brain is a complex organ with active components composed largely of neurons, glial cells, and blood vessels. There exists an enormous experimental and theoretical literature on the mechanisms involved in the functioning of the brain, but we still do not have a good understanding of how it works on a gross mechanistic level. In general, the brain maintains a homeostatic state with relatively...

OBJECTIVES Increased risk of circulatory system diseases (CSDs) was observed in nuclear workers handling uranium and plutonium in Russia and the UK. This work examines the CSD mortality after chronic intake of uranium among 2897 workers (79,892 person-years) at a uranium processing plant (1960-2006) in France. METHODS Cumulative exposure to different uranium compounds, classified by their iso...

A major domain of depression is decreased motivation for reward. Translational automated tests can be applied in humans and animals to study operant reward behaviour, aetio-pathophysiology underlying deficits therein, and effects of antidepressant treatment. Three inter-related experiments were conducted to investigate depression-relevant effects of chronic psychosocial stress on operant behavi...

Color structure descriptor (CSD) provides satisfactory image indexing and retrieval results among other color-based descriptors in MPEG-7. The superiority comes from the consideration of space distribution of pixel colors. In this paper, we proposed the first CSD hardware architecture which can generate CSD description with frame size 256 × 256 and 30 frames per second (fps). This architecture ...

Squaring and exponentiation of a number are fundamental arithmetic and widely used in the real-time applications such as image processing, digital filtering and cryptography. In this paper, we propose a squaring algorithm of an integer with canonical signed-digit (CSD) number representation. For an n-digit CSD number, our method generates n/4 CSD numbers of 2n-digit length as partial products. ...

Prevalent speaker recognition methods use only spectralenvelope based features such as MFCC, ignoring the rich speaker identity information contained in the temporalspectral dynamics of the entire speech signal. We propose a new feature called compressed spectral dynamics or CSD for speaker recognition based on a compressed time-frequency representations of spoken passwords which effectively ca...