Desmosomes in a tangle ntermediate filament–associated desmosomes—like their actin-associated counterparts, adherens junctions—link neighboring epithelial cells through cadherin connections. Crystal structure analyses of adherens junction cadherins suggested that these proteins interact at their NH 2 -terminal tips. A recent model shows that the most distal of five extracellular domains, called...

www.stormh2o.com Mosquitoes are annoying. No joke. A single mosquito flying around your bedroom when you are trying to sleep can literally test your mental and emotional limits. While one is bad enough, a swarm of mosquitoes can lead to outright panic. What’s more, many species have embraced the urban lifestyle, using sources of standing water we’ve intentionally or unintentionally created as n...

Multiple Sclerosis (MS) is a major cause of neurological disability in adults and has an annual cost of approximately $28 billion in the United States. MS is a very complex disorder as demyelination can happen in a variety of locations throughout the brain; therefore, this disease is never the same in two patients making it very hard to predict disease progression. A modeling approach which com...

Assessment of the causation relationship between two phenomena requires the demonstration of an epidemiological association, a temporal and asymmetric sequence, and a biological gradient and identification of the biological mechanism(s). All epidemiological studies on sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS) and smoking have encountered major bias and difficult data interpretation but they all have ...

In addition to fight-or-flight, humans dem onstrate tending and befriending responses to stress? responses underpinned by the hormone oxytocin, by opi oids, and by dopaminergic pathways. A working model of affiliation under stress suggests that oxytocin may be a biomarker of social distress that accompanies gaps or problems with social relationships and that may provide an impetus for affiliati...

The combination of bioinformatics, genomics and proteomics is a rapidly expanding research field that has now become essential for the investigation of biological, cellular and molecular phenomena, both in terms of established facts and in prediction models based on simulations, and therefore can greatly contribute to the development of potential new therapeutic approaches. This article provide...

This review presents an survey to the biological importance of sesquiterpene lactones (SLs) in the fight against four infectious neglected tropical diseases (NTDs)-leishmaniasis, schistosomiasis, Chagas disease, and sleeping sickness-as alternatives to the current chemotherapies that display several problems such as low effectiveness, resistance, and high toxicity. Several studies have demonstr...

We apply reinforcement learning to the problem of finding good policies for a fighting agent in a commercial computer game. The learning agent is trained using the SARSA algorithm for on-policy learning of an action-value function represented by linear and neural network function approximators. We discuss the selection and construction of features, actions, and rewards as well as other design c...

Within the species Astyanax mexicanus, there are several inter-fertile populations of river-dwelling sighted fish and cave-dwelling blind fish which have evolved morphological and behavioral adaptations. We have recently reported a developmental and neurophysiological basis for the loss of aggressive behavior in the blind cavefish morph of Astyanax. Using an appropriate behavioral assay, we hav...

Researchers are building their response to the attack by creationism on evolution as interest in Darwin memorabilia continues to grow.