Most reservoir fluids contain heavy paraffinic compounds that may precipitate as a solid or solid like material called wax if the fluid is cooled down. Wax precipitation is a phenomenon of considerable importance in oil industry. An increase in aggregation results in enhanced oil viscosity. This however causes significant negative effects on production, transportation and processing of crude oi...

Aerogels are a special class of porous material, which have excellent physicochemical properties such as low density, high porosity, high surface area and adjustable surface chemistry. Aerogels were first prepared several decades ago, but never truly commercialized due to their high cost. Technological advancements in the production and quality of different types of aerogel cut costs down and m...

In a recent study a strong congruency-effect has been shown between processing numbers (high/low) and nouns with an implicit up or down directional cue (e.g. roof/root). On this basis, the present study investigates the impact of grammatical number on this effect. Subjects processed number cues (2,3,8,9) followed by singular nouns with either up, down or none oriented cue in one condition and t...

Top-down modulation underlies our ability to selectively attend to relevant stimuli and to ignore irrelevant stimuli. Theories addressing neural mechanisms of top-down modulation are driven by studies that reveal increased magnitude of neural activity in response to directed attention, but are limited by a lack of data reporting modulation of neural processing speed, as well as comparisons with...

Distinct areas within the visual association cortex are specialized for representing specific stimulus features, such as V4 for color and V5/hMT+ for motion. Recent studies have demonstrated that areas associated with attended features exhibit enhanced cortical activity, whereas those associated with ignored features elicit reduced activity. However, the source of this attentional (or top-down)...

Protein kinase C-delta (PKC delta) plays an important role in DNA damage-induced apoptosis. We have previously shown that the PKC delta inhibitor rottlerin protects against cisplatin-induced apoptosis acting upstream of caspase-9. In the present study, we have investigated if rottlerin regulates caspase-2 activation. Knockdown of caspase-2 by siRNA inhibited processing of apical caspase-9 and c...