Orexin-containing neurons regulate wakefulness, and loss of orexin produces narcolepsy. Recent studies of mice lacking orexin neurons have shown that these cells also play essential roles in the control of feeding and energy balance.

An exact invariant is derived for n-degree-of-freedom Hamiltonian systems with general time-dependent potentials. The invariant is worked out in two equivalent ways. In the first approach, we define a special Ansatz for the invariant and determine its time-dependent coefficients. In the second approach, we perform a two-step canonical transformation of the initially time-dependent Hamiltonian t...

Calorimetry is the basis of the science of nutrition, a statement I iirst saw as the title of a paper by the chief of the department of medicine at the Mayo Foundation (Wilder, 1959). Our science began when Lavoisier put a guinea pig into a calorimeter, measured the amount of ice melted and showed that this was quantitatively related to the amount of fixed air or carbon dioxide given off by the...

A thermodynamic argument is proposed in order to discuss the most appropriate form of the local energy balance equation within the Oberbeck-Boussinesq approximation. The study is devoted to establish the correct thermodynamic property to be used in order to express the relationship between the change of internal energy and the temperature change. It is noted that, if the fluid is a perfect gas,...

A combined pyrolysis and gasification process for sewage sludge was studied in this paper for the purpose of its safe disposal with energy self-balance. Three sewage sludge samples with different dry basis lower heat values (LHV(db)) were used to evaluate the constraints on this combined process. Those samples were pre-dried and then pyrolysed within the temperature range of 400-550 degrees C. ...

T HE FACT that a substantial, and perhaps increasing, proportion of United States children are obese, together with current emphasis on the problem of weight control, has focused attention on the possible causes of this condition. Interest has been heightened by the recognition that obesity in children and adolescents, particularly if it has been persistent throughout a major portion of the gro...

Food storing is seasonal in birds like chickadees, nuthatches and jays, occurring at high levels in fall and winter and low levels in spring and summer. Memory for cache sites is hippocampus dependent in chickadees and both the recruitment of new neurons into the hippocampus and the total size of the hippocampus change seasonally. Unlike seasonal change in the vocal control nuclei of songbirds,...

Daily animal solutions were predicted using random regression analysis for feed intake, milk yield, live weight, and condition score recorded on 189 cows at the Langhill Dairy Cattle Research Centre. All cows had three successive lactations. Energy balance for days 1 to 305 of each of the three lactations was calculated both from daily measures of feed intake and milk output and from weekly mea...

BACKGROUND Studies on the impact of the 'obesogenic' environment have often used non-theoretical approaches. In this journal's debate and in other papers authors have argued the necessity of formulating conceptual models for differentiating the causal role of environmental influences on behavior. DISCUSSION The present paper aims to contribute to the debate by presenting a dual-process view o...

Thermodynamic methods to predict true yield and stoichiometry of bacterial reactions have been widely used in biotechnology and environmental engineering. However, yield predictions are often inaccurate for certain simple organic compounds. This work evaluates an existing method and identifies the cause of prediction errors for compounds with low degree of reductance of carbon. For these compou...