NEW FINDINGS What is the central question of this study? Rate-pressure product (RPP) is commonly used as an index of cardiac 'effort'. In canine and human hearts (which have a positive force-frequency relationship), RPP is linearly correlated with oxygen consumption and has therefore been widely adopted as a species-independent index of cardiac work. However, given that isolated rodent hearts d...

In order to study particle phagocytosis and glycogenolysis simultaneously, this study was designed to develop a direct-read-out method to monitor Kupffer-cell function continuously, based on the uptake of colloidal carbon by the isolated perfused rat liver. Livers were perfused for 20 min with Krebs-Henseleit buffer saturated with O2/CO2 (19:1). Colloidal carbon (1-2 mg/ml) was added to the buf...

The pathophysiology of human airway narrowing is only partly understood. In order to gain more insight in the mechanisms of human lung diseases and potential beneficial therapeutic agents, adequate models are needed. Animal airway models are of limited value since lung diseases such as asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) are unique to humans and because the mechanisms of air...

Scientific discoveries are increasingly dependent upon the analysis of large volumes of data from observations and simulations of complex phenomena. Scientists compose the complex analyses as workflows and execute them on largescale HPC systems. The workflow structures are in contrast with monolithic single simulations that have often been the primary use case on HPC systems. Simultaneously, ne...

HEALERS is a practical, high-performance toolkit that can enhance the robustness and security of existing applications. For any shared library, it can find all functions defined in that library and automatically derives properties for those functions. Through automated faultinjection experiments, it can detect arguments that cause the library to crash and derive safe argument types for each fun...