Previous studies suggest that nocebo effects, sometimes termed "negative placebo effects," can contribute appreciably to a variety of medical symptoms and adverse events in clinical trials and medical care. In this study, using a within-subject design, we combined functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and an expectation/conditioning manipulation model to investigate the neural substrates...

Contextual fear conditioning studies in animals and humans found an involvement of the hippocampus and amygdala during fear learning. To exclude a focus on elements of the context we employed a paradigm, which uses two feature-identical contexts that only differ in the arrangement of the features and requires configural processing. We employed functional magnetic resonance imaging to determine ...

Striga hermonthica is an obligate, root parasite, that limits cereal production in sub-Saharan Africa. Successful control depends on eliminating its seed reserves in soil, thereby preventing parasitism. Two experiments were conducted to evaluate the effects of salinity on germination traits and seedling growth of sorghum (cultivar Wad Ahmed) and S. hermonthica. The experiments were conducted in...

The aim of the present study was to improve the chilling tolerance of cucumber seedlings. The conditioned seeds in solutions of salicylic or jasmonic acid in concentrations of 10-2, 10-3 or 10-4 M or brassinolide in concentrations of 10-6, 10-8 or 10-10 M were subjected to temperature shock of 0, 2.5, 5, 35, 40 or 45°C for 1, 2 or 4 hours. Seedlings with 3 mm roots were chilled at 0°C for three...

This study examines the consequences of adjacent elements for a given patch, through their effects on zoochorous dispersion by frugivorous birds. The case study consists of pine plantations (the focal patch) adjacent to other patches of native vegetation (mixed patches of native forest and shrublands), and/or pine plantations. Our hypothesis is that input of native woody species propagules gene...

For sustainability and energy saving, the problem to optimize the control of heating, ventilating, and air-conditioning (HVAC) systems has attracted great attentions, but analyzing the signatures of thermal environments and HVAC systems and the evaluation of the optimization policies has encountered inefficiency and inconvenient problems due to the lack of public dataset. In this paper, we pres...

ATSON and CASPARI (1960) developed a mathematical model to study the VU behavior of cytoplasmic pollen sterility in populations. They dealt with a population possessing two kinds of cytoplasm and pollen sterility resulting from an interaction of the recessive homozygote with one of the cytoplasms. Under these conditions the frequencies of the maternally transmitted cytoplasms remained unchanged...

This research was designed to study sexual differences in place conditioning induced by morphine in offspring born of female Wistar rats mated with drug-naïve males. Mothers were exposed to morphine during the 14th-16th days of gestational. Control dams were simply saline-injected. Female and male virgin offspring born of morphine-treated or saline-treated mothers were separately housed until b...