BACKGROUND Williams syndrome (WS), a neurodevelopmental disorder, is characterized by pervasive cognitive deficits alongside a relative sparing of auditory perception and cognition. A frequent characteristic of the phenotype is adverse reactions to, and/or fascination with, certain sounds. Previously published reports indicate that people with WS experience hyperacusis, yet careful examination ...

Reports of substantial clonal mixing measured in social aphid colonies seem, on the face of it, to rule out population structure as an explanation of this enigmatic insect's social behaviour. To clarify how selection operates in aphids, and to disentangle direct and indirect fitness components, we present a model of the life cycle of a typical colony-dwelling aphid. The model incorporates ecolo...

Most individuals with Williams syndrome (WS) have a 1.6 Mb deletion in chromosome 7q11.23 that encompasses the elastin (ELN) gene, while most families with autosomal dominant supravalvar aortic stenosis (SVAS) have point mutations in ELN. The overlap of the clinical phenotypes of the two conditions (cardiovascular disease and connective tissue abnormalities such as hernias) is due to the effect...

Management of IT services in general and Web Services (WS) in particular currently relies on syntactic descriptions of service interfaces using languages such as WSDL (Web Service Description Language), BPEL (Business Process Execution Language) or XPDL (XML Process Definition Language). As a consequence, complex management tasks such as WS discovery, interoperability or adaptability can not be...

Williams syndrome (WS) is a rare genetic disorder characterized by intellectual impairment and a distinctive physical and neuropsychological profile. Relative to their level of intellectual functioning, individuals with WS exhibit strengths in language and face recognition, with deficits in visual-spatial cognition. A heightened appetitive drive toward social interaction is a strong behavioral ...

Background: We investigated the effects of Withania somnifera root (WS) on insulin resistance, tumor necrosis factor α (TNF-α), and interleukin-6 (IL-6) in fructose-fed rats. Methods: Forty-eight Wistar-Albino male rats were randomly divided into four groups (n=12); Group I as control, Group II as sham-treated with WS by 62.5mg/g per diet, Group III fructose-fed rats received 10%...

We present a detailed study of the polarization properties of four-wave mixing in multiquantum-well (MQW) semiconductor optical amplifiers (SOA’s). In particular, the polarization selection rules relevant to all processes contributing to the generation of the four-wave mixing signal are rigorously derived and discussed. We then show the importance of these results in applications where four-wav...

Werner syndrome (WS) is a rare autosomal recessive genetic disease in human. It is considered as a good model disease in studying human premature syndrome. Werner protein (WRN) is a nuclear protein mutated in WS. Recent biochemical and genetic studies indicated that WRN plays important roles in DNA replication, DNA repair, and telomere maintenance. Here, we reviewed the molecular genetics of WS...