The ubiquitously expressed Orai Ca2+ channels are gated through a unique process of intermembrane coupling with the Ca2+-sensing STIM proteins. Despite the significance of Orai1-mediated Ca2+ signals, how gating of Orai1 is triggered by STIM1 remains unknown. A widely held gating model invokes STIM1 binding directly to Orai1 pore-forming helix. Here we report that an Orai1 C-terminal STIM1-bind...

An important aim of the current research effort in artificial intelligence and robotics is to achieve cooperative agent behavior for teams of robots in real-world scenarios. Especially in the RoboCup scenario, but also in other projects like Nexus, agents have to cooperate efficiently to reach certain goals. In the RoboCup project, cooperative team-play and team strategies similar to real world...

Water, energy, and food are lifelines for modern societies. The continuously rising world population, growing desires for higher living standards, and inextricable links among the three sectors make the water-energy-food (WEF) nexus a vibrant research pursuit. For the integrated delivery of WEF systems, quantifying WEF connections helps understand synergies and trade-offs across the water, ener...

The crime-terror nexus includes two independent, but related, components. First, it incorporates the straightforward involvement in criminal activities by terrorists as a source of funding, and second, it refers to the linkages between organized criminal organizations and terrorist groups. Indeed, the criminal and political organizations appear to be learning from each other, adopting each othe...

The goal of this project is to develop solutions to enhance interoperability between bioinformatics applications. Most existing applications adopt different data formats, forcing biologists into tedious translation work. We propose to use of Nexus as an intermediate representation language. We develop a complete grammar for Nexus and we adopt this grammar to build a parser. The construction hea...

The recent development of microarray technology provided unprecedented opportunities to understand the genetic basis of aging. So far, many microarray studies have addressed aging-related expression patterns in multiple organisms and under different conditions. The number of relevant studies continues to increase rapidly. However, efficient exploitation of these vast data is frustrated by the l...

To better understand intrinsic brain connections in major depression, we used a neuroimaging technique that measures resting state functional connectivity using functional MRI (fMRI). Three different brain networks--the cognitive control network, default mode network, and affective network--were investigated. Compared with controls, in depressed subjects each of these three networks had increas...

Concerns about the water–energy–food (WEF) nexus have motivated many discussions regarding new approaches for managing water, energy and food resources. Despite the progress in recent years, there remainmany challenges in scientific research on theWEF nexus, while implementation as a management tool is just beginning. The scientific challenges are primarily related to data, information and know...

BACKGROUND The paper reports on the importance of the interpersonal nexus within qualitative research processes, from a recent research project on patient experiences of shoulder surgery. Our aim is to reveal the importance of qualitative research processes and specifically the role of the interpersonal nexus in generating quality data. Literature related to the importance of human interactions...