Disease tolerance is a defense strategy that limits the fitness costs of infection irrespectively of pathogen burden. While restricting iron (Fe) availability to pathogens is perceived as a host defense strategy, the resulting tissue Fe overload can be cytotoxic and promote tissue damage to exacerbate disease severity. Examining this interplay during malaria, the disease caused by Plasmodium in...

One of the machine learning challenges posed by the robot soccer domain is to learn the opponents strategies. A team that may be able to do it efficiently may have the advantage to adapt its own strategy as a response to the opponent’s strategy. In this work, we propose a similarity function to compare two teams, and consequently their strategies, by the ability of one team to mimic the behavio...

Long-term amygdala kindling produces substantial changes in emotional behavior in rats. The purpose of these experiments was to determine whether kindling-induced emotionality is fundamentally defensive or aggressive in nature. In Experiment 1, amygdala-kindled rats tested as intruders in a resident-intruder paradigm preferred an active defense strategy (i.e., defensive upright stance, jump att...

Competitive decision making may require controlling and calculative mind-sets. We examined this possibility in repeated predator-prey contests by up- or down-regulating the individual's right inferior frontal gyrus (rIFG), a brain region involved in impulse inhibition and mentalizing. Following brain stimulation, subjects invested as predator or prey against a non-treated antagonist. Relative t...

By phagocytosing cancer cells and their cellular debris, macrophages play a critical role in nonspecific defense (innate immunity) and, as antigen presenters, they help initiate specific defense mechanisms (adaptive immunity). Malignant melanoma is a lethal disease due to its aggressive capacity for metastasis and resistance to therapy. For decades, considerable effort has gone into development...

In an earlier study, presented at the 3 rd EUCASS [1], an innovative guidance strategy was outlined by integrating the design of a multiple model adaptive estimator and a differential game based guidance law. Such strategy indicated two potential breakthroughs in the interception of randomly maneuvering targets in Ballistic Missile Defense. Further studies indicated that while the differential ...

from applied linguistic point of view, the fundamental question facing the language teachers, methodologists and course designers is which procedure is more effective in fl/sl: learning to use or using to learn? definitely, in order to be a competent language user, knowledge of language system is necessary, but it is not sufficient to be a successful language user. that is why there was a gradu...

271 ON MAY 10, 2007, THE CENTER for Biosecurity of the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center convened an invitational meeting to discuss a national strategy for developing “flexible defenses” against chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear (CBRN) threats. This was the second of two meetings held by the Center to discuss issues related to those aspects of the Pandemic and All-Hazards P...