BACKGROUND Graphite electrode manufacturing workers are exposed to coal tar and its volatiles containing a variety of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAH), silica and graphite dusts, and asbestos. AIMS To investigate mortality from cancer and other diseases among workers in a graphite electrode production plant in Italy. METHODS A total of 1291 males actively employed between 1 January 19...

Shingled Magnetic Recording (SMR) technology increases the areal density of hard disk drives. Among the three types of SMR drives on the market today, Host Aware SMR (HA-SMR) drives look the most promising. In this paper, we carry out evaluation to understand the performance of HA-SMR drives with the objective of building large-scale storage systems using this type of drive. We focus on evaluat...

The hippocampus has unique access to neuronal activity across all of the neocortex. Yet an unanswered question is how the transfer of information between these structures is gated. One hypothesis involves temporal-locking of activity in the neocortex with that in the hippocampus. New data from the Matthew E. Diamond laboratory shows that the rhythmic neuronal activity that accompanies vibrissa-...

People can learn to control electroencephalographic (EEG) sensorimotor rhythm amplitude so as to move a cursor to select among choices on a computer screen. We explored the dependence of system performance on EEG control. Users moved the cursor to reach a target at one of four possible locations. EEG control was measured as the correlation (r(2)) between rhythm amplitude and target location. Pe...

Human cognition is thought to be mediated by large-scale interactions between distant sites in the neocortex. Synchronization between different cortical areas has been suggested as one possible mechanism for corticocortical interaction. Here, we report robust, directional cross-frequency synchronization between distant sensorimotor sites in human neocortex during a movement task. In four subjec...

This paper, directed at researchers in linguistics, introduces three key aspects of musical rhythm and time for their consideration: (1) the distinction between groups of durations (i.e., acoustical events in the world) and our endogenous sense of beats and beat cycles, that is, musical meter; (2) the active nature of rhythmic perception and cognition, which involves both innate and enculturate...

There are a number of difference brainwave frequencies which relate to different states of arousal. These frequencies are presented in Table 1 below. Individuals with AD/HD tend to experience mental wandering, often drifting in their thoughts, and are unable to centralise their attention or grasp information. This occurs during attentional tasks such as reading or listening to a story. During s...

10.1016/S1674-6384(14)60044-7 Objective Shengmai Recipe (SMR) is a Chinese patent medicine used for the treatment of chronic heart disease. In order to further assess the renal-protective effect against ischemia lesion of SMR, the cardioprotective effect of SMR on pressure overload-induced left ventricular (LV) systolic dysfunction and the potential mechanism on alleviating myocardial damage, ...