The paper proposes a GUARD (GUide, Alarm, Recovery, and Detection) system for the blind. The main goal of the GUARD system is to construct an obstacle-aware wireless sensor network and provide guide, alarm, recovery, as well as detection functions for the blind to guarantee his safety and convenience at Tamkang University. Some hardware components as well as communication and management protoco...

Anti-Helicobacter pylori activities were determined by agar dilution, confocal laser scanning microscopy, and cell proliferation assays following treatment with various grape extracts. Muscadine grape skin possessed the strongest activity, followed by grape synergy (skin and seed) and seed, suggesting that higher phenolic levels do not necessarily determine overall anti-H. pylori efficacy.

OBJECTIVE Mucositis is a serious disorder of the gastrointestinal tract that results from cancer chemotherapy. We investigated the effects of increasing grape seed extract doses on the severity of chemotherapy in a rat model and its coincident impact on chemotherapeutic effectiveness in colon cancer cells. DESIGN Female Dark Agouti rats were gavaged with grape seed extract (400-1000 mg/kg) or...

Sucrose synthase (SS) is widely considered as the key enzyme involved in the plant sugar metabolism that is critical to plant growth and development, especially quality of the fruit. The members of SS gene family have been identified and characterized in multiple plant genomes. However, detailed information about this gene family is lacking in grapevine (Vitis vinifera L.). In this study, we pe...

We present the results of gravitational direct N-body simulations using the commercial graphics processing units (GPU) NVIDIA Quadro FX1400 and GeForce 8800GTX, and compare the results with GRAPE-6Af special purpose hardware. The force evaluation of the N-body problem was implemented in Cg using the GPU directly to speed-up the calculations. The integration of the equations of motions were, run...

MOTIVATION The avalanche of data arriving since the development of NGS technologies have prompted the need for developing fast, accurate and easily automated bioinformatic tools capable of dealing with massive datasets. Among the most productive applications of NGS technologies is the sequencing of cellular RNA, known as RNA-Seq. Although RNA-Seq provides similar or superior dynamic range than ...

BACKGROUND The TIFY gene family constitutes a plant-specific group of genes with a broad range of functions. This family encodes four subfamilies of proteins, including ZML, TIFY, PPD and JASMONATE ZIM-Domain (JAZ) proteins. JAZ proteins are targets of the SCF(COI1) complex, and function as negative regulators in the JA signaling pathway. Recently, it has been reported in both Arabidopsis and r...

Pattern mat hing is a well-appre iated feature of languages like ML or Haskell; it greatly simpli es the task of inspe ting values of stru tured data types and fa ilitates su in t fun tion de nitions that are easy to understand. In its basi form, pattern mat hing tries to identify a ertain stru ture of a value to be pro essed by a fun tion. This stru ture is spe i ed by a pattern, and if it an ...