Mice that carry additional copies of genes comparable to those present on human chromosome 21 have been shown to perform better on memory tests when treated with drugs that target brain function. Could this be an important break-through in the search for pharmacological therapies to assist people with Down syndrome?

Cortical area MT/V5 in the human occipito-temporal cortex is activated by visual motion. In this study, we use functional imaging to demonstrate that a subregion of MT/V5 is more strongly activated by unidirectional motion with speed gradients than by other motion patterns. Our results suggest that like the monkey homolog middle temporal area (MT), human MT/V5 contains neurons selective for the...

This study aimed to identify neural mechanisms that underlie perceptual learning in a visual-discrimination task. We trained two monkeys (Macaca mulatta) to determine the direction of visual motion while we recorded from their middle temporal area (MT), which in trained monkeys represents motion information that is used to solve the task, and lateral intraparietal area (LIP), which represents t...

The management of multimedia information is a key issue when permissions, protection issues and rights are involved. The appearance of new multimedia description formats, new distribution channels and diverse business models makes it difficult to provide a general solution for performing such management. In this scenario, the description of architectures and protocols appears as a valid approac...

The perceptual interpretation of a given visual feature depends on the surrounding context. To explore the neural mechanisms underlying such contextual interactions in the motion domain, we studied responses of neurons in the middle temporal area (MT) of macaque monkeys while presenting a variety of center-surround stimuli that stimulated both the classical receptive visual field (CRF) and the ...

This study reports an analysis of the IR reflectance and Raman spectra of Cd x Zn(1 - x)P2 solid solutions. We have analyzed the effect of the doping of the CdP2 single crystal by the ZnP2 nanoclusters on the vibrational properties of studied samples: ε 0, ε inf, phonon frequencies, and strengths. These dependencies might be used as an alternative non-destructive way for the control of the Cd x...

Polymorphism data from 20 partially resequenced copies of human chromosome 21-more than 20,000 polymorphic sites-were analyzed. The allele-frequency distribution shows no deviation from the simplest population genetic model with a constant population size (although we show that our analysis has no power to detect population growth). The average rate of recombination per site is estimated to be ...

The macaque middle temporal area (MT) is exquisitely sensitive to visual motion and there is a large amount of evidence that neural activity in MT is tightly correlated with the perception of motion. The mechanisms by which MT neurons achieve their directional selectivity, however, have received considerably less attention. We investigated the motion-energy model as a description of motion mech...

The transdermal therapeutic systems (TTS) usually achieve constant plasma concentration for an extended period of time. This is because a sufficient drug stored in the device can keep the constant concentration on the surface of the stratum corneum during the system application. When the drug molecules are not enough to provide the constant surface concentration, the rate of drug penetration de...

We develop a dynamic programming algorithm for haplotype block partitioning to minimize the number of representative single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) required to account for most of the common haplotypes in each block. Any measure of haplotype quality can be used in the algorithm and of course the measure should depend on the specific application. The dynamic programming algorithm is appl...