Rationale: During the transition from compensated hypertrophy to heart failure, the signaling between L-type Ca 2+ channels (LCCs) in the cell membrane/T-tubules (TTs) and ryanodine receptors (RyRs) in the sarcoplasmic reticulum (SR) becomes defective, partially due to the decreased expression of a TT-SR anchoring protein, junctophilin-2 (JP2). MiR-24, a JP2 suppressing microRNA, is up-regulate...

We perform a retrospective investigation of multi-decade trends in price and life-cycle cost (LCC) for home appliances in periods with and without energy efficiency (EE) standards and labeling polices. In contrast to the classical picture of the impact of efficiency standards, the introduction and updating of appliance standards is not associated with a long-term increase in purchase price; rat...

The biogas yield of rice straw during anaerobic digestion can be substantially increased through solid-state sodium hydroxide (NaOH) pretreatment. This study was conducted to explore the mechanisms of biogas yield enhancement. The chemical compositions of the pretreated rice straw were first analyzed. Fourier transform infrared (FTIR), hydrogen-1 nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy (1H NMR)...

We present work concerning the formal specification of business processes. It is of substantial benefit to be able to pin down the meaning of business processes precisely. This is an end in itself, but we are also concerned to do so in order that we might prove properties about the business processes that are being specified. It is a notable characteristic of most languages for representing bus...

In error-correcting codes, locality refers to several different ways of quantifying how easily a small amount of information can be recovered from encoded data. In this work, we study a notion of locality called the s-Disjoint-Repair-Group Property (s-DRGP). This notion can interpolate between two very different settings in coding theory: that of Locally Correctable Codes (LCCs) when s is large...

The study aims at developing forest cover inventory from high resolution satellite imagery (0.6m) of Ayubia National Park, NWFP, Pakistan. The 3372 ha study area is one of the best examples of existing moist temperate Himalayan forest in Pakistan. Landscapes composed of large number of heterogeneous and complex elements, exhibit multi-scale hierarchical dependencies. A multi-scale object based ...

In cardiac ventricular myocytes, events crucial to excitation-contraction coupling take place in spatially restricted microdomains known as dyads. The movement and dynamics of calcium (Ca2+) ions in the dyad have often been described by assigning continuously valued Ca2+ concentrations to one or more dyadic compartments. However, even at its peak, the estimated number of free Ca2+ ions present ...

Non-small cell lung carcinoma (NSCLC) is a leading cause of cancer-related deaths. Aberrance of the two oncogenes MET and SOX2 are frequently encountered in NSCLC. Exons 18 through 21 of the EGFR gene were screened and MET and SOX2 immunostaining was conducted to analyze the immunohistological staining of MET and SOX2 and the EGFR mutation status. One hundred and fifty tissue samples were exami...

As wind power farm (WPF) installations continue to grow, monitoring and controlling large-scale WPFs presents new challenges. In this paper, a hierarchical network architecture is proposed in order to provide remote monitoring and control of large-scale WPFs. The network architecture consists of three levels, including the WPF comprised of wind turbines and meteorological towers, local control ...