Brucella abortus is a facultative intracellular bacterium capable of surviving inside macrophages. The VirB complex, which is highly similar to conjugative DNA transfer apparatuses, is required for intracellular replication. A conserved NTP-binding domain in VirB4 suggests that one or both proteins couple energy by NTP hydrolysis to transport of putative effector molecule(s). Here it is shown t...

PURPOSE The fourth state of matter, plasma is known as an ionized gas with electrons, radicals and ions. The use of non-thermal plasma (NTP) in cancer research became possible because of the progresses in plasma medicine. Previous studies on the potential NTP-mediated cancer therapy have mainly concentrated on cancer cell apoptosis. In the present study, we compared the inhibitory effect of NTP...

NTP has been recently used to distinguish the one-atmosphere, near room temperature plasma discharges from other plasmas, operating at hundreds or thousands of degrees above ambient. Industrially applied plasma technologies, is that they are 1) non-thermal and 2) operate at or near atmospheric pressure. NTP is a new technology for environmental protection, especially in the field of air polluti...

Understanding the nature and characteristics of Internet events such as route changes and outages can serve as the starting point for improvements in network configurations, management and monitoring practices. However, the scale, diversity, and dynamics of network infrastructure makes event detection and analysis challenging. In this paper, we describe a new approach to Internet event measurem...

BACKGROUND A delay is evident between the development of new policies on TB diagnostics and their implementation at country level. The Stop TB Partnership would benefit from information from national TB program (NTP) managers on progress towards implementation of new recommendations as well as the opportunities and challenges encountered in the process. METHODS AND FINDINGS To solicit informa...

We explore the risk that network attackers can exploit unauthenticated Network Time Protocol (NTP) traffic to alter the time on client systems. We first discuss how an onpath attacker, that hijacks traffic to an NTP server, can quickly shift time on the server’s clients. Then, we present an extremely low-rate (single packet) denial-of-service attack that an off-path attacker, located anywhere o...

Three recurring hypotheses are often used to explain the effect of non-thermal plasmas (NTPs) on NTP catalytic hybrid reactions; namely, modification or heating of the catalyst or creation of new reaction pathways by plasma-produced species. NTP-assisted methane (CH4 ) oxidation over Pd/Al2 O3 was investigated by direct monitoring of the X-ray absorption fine structure of the catalyst, coupled ...

Quantitative determination of enzymatic rates, processivity and mechanochemical coupling is a key aspect in characterizing nucleotide triphosphate (NTP)-driven nucleic acid motor enzymes, for both basic research and technological applications. Here, we present a streamlined analytical method suitable for the determination of all key functional parameters based on measurement of NTP hydrolysis d...

Plasma is a partially or fully ionized gas consisting of various particles, such as electrons, ions, atoms, and molecules. For the quantitative description of plasma, the term of temperature is usually used. Thermal plasma is in a state where almost all its components are at thermal equilibrium. In nonthermal plasmas (NTPs), temperature (i.e. kinetic energy) is not in thermal equilibrium, and d...

The National Toxicology Program (NTP) Center for the Evaluation of Risks to Human Reproduction (CERHR) conducted an evaluation of the potential for butyl benzyl phthalate (BBP) to cause adverse effects on reproduction and development in humans. BBP is one of 7 phthalate chemicals evaluated by the NTP CERHR Phthalates Expert Panel. These phthalates were selected for evaluation because of high pr...