In the process of the highway tunnel construction, the stability and the reliability of tunnel rock is an important guarantee to ensure safety construction. Tunnel surrounding rock deformation monitoring is an important method for obtaining information on surrounding rock and controlling tunnel stability in the period of construction. Forecasting deformation of surrounding rock is the key to es...

CXCR4 is a chemokine receptor often found aberrantly expressed on metastatic tumor cells. To investigate CXCR4 signaling in tumor cell adhesion, we stably overexpressed CXCR4 in MCF7 breast tumor cells. Cell attachment assays demonstrate that stimulation of the receptor with its ligand, CXCL12, promotes adhesion of MCF7-CXCR4 cells to both extracellular matrix and endothelial ligands. To more c...

RhoE belongs to the Rho GTPase family, the members of which control actin cytoskeletal dynamics. RhoE induces stress fiber disassembly in a variety of cell types, whereas RhoA stimulates stress fiber assembly. The similarity of RhoE and RhoA sequences suggested that RhoE might compete with RhoA for interaction with its targets. Here, we show that RhoE binds ROCK I but none of the other RhoA tar...

[1] We argue that by fracturing rock, not by raising it relative to base level, tectonics plays its most important role in causing rapid incision of valleys and rapid erosion of hillslopes. Tectonic deformation riddles the upper crust with fractures, which not only provide avenues for water flow and thus promote weathering and further disintegration of rock but also fragment bedrock into debris...

A rock mass is a material quite different from other structural materials used in civil engineering. It is heterogeneous and quite often discontinuous, but is one of the materials in the earth's crust, which is most used in man's construction. Ideally, a rock mass is composed of a system of rock blocks and fragments separated by discontinuities forming a material in which all elements behave in...

Manganiferous rock varnish (desert varnish) is common in subtropical deserts, but coatings of amorphous silica glaze dominate rock surfaces of the same lithology and exposed to similar amounts of annual precipitation in the rain shadows of the large tropical shield volcanoes such as those in Hawaii. Lacking an explanation for this contrast, a two decade-long laboratory experiment tested importa...

[1] Rock physics attempts to relate the geophysical response of a rock to geologic properties of interest, such as porosity, lithology, and fluid content. The geophysical properties estimated by field-scale surveys, however, are impacted by additional factors, such as complex averaging of heterogeneity at the scale of the survey and artifacts introduced through data inversion, that are not addr...

OBJECTIVE Rock musicians are known to have an increased prevalence of hearing loss and tinnitus. The aims of the present study were to examine the distribution of anxiety and depression symptoms among rock musicians with or without tinnitus and how these mental health indicators and internal locus of control influenced upon their tinnitus symptom concerns and the degree to which the tinnitus af...

Ras homolog family member A (RhoA) and Rho-associated coiled coil-containing protein kinases 1 and 2 (ROCK1 and 2) are key regulators of focal adhesion, actomyosin contraction and cell motility. RhoA/ROCK signaling has emerged as an attractive target for the development of new cancer therapeutics. Whether RhoA/ROCK is involved in regulating the formation of tumor cell vasculogenic mimicry (VM) ...

BACKGROUND In epithelial and endothelial cells, detachment from the matrix results in anoikis, a form of apoptosis, whereas stromal and cancer cells are often anchorage independent. The classical anoikis model is based on static 3D epithelial cell culture conditions (STCK). METHODS We characterized a new model of renal, stromal and mesenchymal stem cell (MSC) matrix deprivation, based on slow...