Effects of Long Term Ethanol Consumption on Cell Death in Liver

Apoptosis plays an important role in cellular homeostasis. In this study we have investigated whether apoptosis is a contributory factor to alcohol induced liver damage. Long term ethanol (1.6 g/kg body weight/day) exposure augmented liver apoptosis as reflected by high frequency of positive TUNEL staining nuclei and by an increased activity of caspase-3 and -8. Our study provides evidence that long-term ethanol consumption triggers apoptotic process in the liver.     

Study of Oxidative Stress in Vitiligo

Vitiligo is an idiopathic, acquired, circumscribed, hypomelanotic skin disorder, characterized by milky white patches of different sizes and shapes. It is due to the destruction of melanocytes resulting in the absence of pigment production of the skin and mucosal surfaces. Oxidative stress has been implicated in pathophysiology of vitiligo. To study the activity of blood Superoxide dismutase (SOD) and Glutathione peroxidase (GPx) in vitiligo patients. A case–control study was conducted in which 100 patients were enrolled after written consent. 50 cases were of active vitiligo and 50 served as control (25 healthy control and 25 with stable vitiligo). SOD—In our study, among the active vitiligo cases 90% had high level of SOD and 10% had normal level of SOD. Among the stable vitiligo controls, 92% had normal level of SOD and 8% had low levels of SOD.The difference between active vitiligo cases and stable vitiligo control as well as with healthy control was statistically significant (P value < 0.05). GPx—Among the active vitiligo cases 74% had normal GPx levels, 22% had low and only 4% had high levels of GPx. Among the stable vitiligo controls, 64% had normal GPx levels, 16% had low, and 20% had high levels of GPx. The difference between active vitiligo cases and stable vitiligo control as well as with healthy control was statistically not significant (P value > 0.05). Our study shows that oxidative stress is involved in the pathophysiology of vitiligo, as indicated by the high levels of serum superoxide dismutase activity.     

Dietary antioxidants and exercise

Muscular exercise promotes the production of radicals and other reactive oxygen species in the working muscle. Growing evidence indicates that reactive oxygen species are responsible for exercise-induced protein oxidation and contribute to muscle fatigue. To protect against exercise-induced oxidative injury, muscle cells contain complex endogenous cellular defence mechanisms (enzymatic and non-enzymatic antioxidants) to eliminate reactive oxygen species. Furthermore, exogenous dietary antioxidants interact with endogenous antioxidants to form a cooperative network of cellular antioxidants. Knowledge that exercise-induced oxidant formation can contribute to muscle fatigue has resulted in numerous investigations examining the effects of antioxidant supplementation on human exercise performance. To date, there is limited evidence that dietary supplementation with antioxidants will improve human performance. Furthermore, it is currently unclear whether regular vigorous exercise increases the need for dietary intake of antioxidants. Clearly, additional research that analyses the antioxidant requirements of individual athletes is needed.     

自制自动铅笔芯电灯泡

自动铅笔芯大家都见过,再平常普通不过了。那么,能像电灯泡一样会发出端庄秀丽、五彩美丽的光的自动铅笔芯,你见过吗?相信你一定没见过。好奇么?走,我们一起动手见证一下!     

Lectin-functionalized microchannels for characterizing pluripotent cells and early differentiation

Embryonic stem (ES) cells are capable of proliferating and differentiating to form cells of the three embryonic germ layers, namely, endoderm, mesoderm, and ectoderm. The utilization of human ES cell derivatives requires the ability to direct differentiation to specific lineages in defined, efficient, and scalable systems. Better markers are needed to identify early differentiation. Lectins have been reported as an attractive alternative to the common stem cell markers. They have been used to identify, characterize, and isolate various cell subpopulations on the basis of the presentation of specific carbohydrate groups on the cell surface. This article demonstrates how simple adhesion assays in lectin-coated microfluidic channels can provide key information on the interaction of lectins with ES and definitive endoderm cells and thereby track early differentiation. The microfluidic approach incorporates both binding strength and cell surface receptor density, whereas traditional flow cytometry only incorporates the latter. Both approaches are examined and shown to be complementary with the microfluidic approach providing more biologically relevant information.     

A Query Expansion Framework in Image Retrieval Domain Based on Local and Global Analysis

We present an image retrieval framework based on automatic query expansion in a concept feature space by generalizing the vector space model of information retrieval. In this framework, images are represented by vectors of weighted concepts similar to the keyword-based representation used in text retrieval. To generate the concept vocabularies, a statistical model is built by utilizing Support Vector Machine (SVM)-based classification techniques. The images are represented as "bag of concepts" that comprise perceptually and/or semantically distinguishable color and texture patches from local image regions in a multi-dimensional feature space. To explore the correlation between the concepts and overcome the assumption of feature independence in this model, we propose query expansion techniques in the image domain from a new perspective based on both local and global analysis. For the local analysis, the correlations between the concepts based on the co-occurrence pattern, and the metrical constraints based on the neighborhood proximity between the concepts in encoded images, are analyzed by considering local feedback information. We also analyze the concept similarities in the collection as a whole in the form of a similarity thesaurus and propose an efficient query expansion based on the global analysis. The experimental results on a photographic collection of natural scenes and a biomedical database of different imaging modalities demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework in terms of precision and recall.     

非暴力是强者的武器 不合作比暴力更积极

不合作不是消极状态，而是十分积极的状态，它比武装抵抗或暴力更积极。消极抵抗是不恰当的用语。我使用的不合作一词必须是非暴力的，因而不是惩罚性的，不是报复性的，也不是建立在怀恨、恶意或仇视的基础上的。     

Teaching life-long learning skills in a fourth-year medical curriculum

For more than twenty years, the Ruth Lilly Medical Library has been a traditional part of the Indiana University School of Medicine curriculum. Recently, following changes to the curriculum, the Library's role has evolved to include responsibility for developing and teaching a Medical Informatics rotation as part of the senior year clerkships. Heavy emphasis is placed on acquiring life-long learning skills, especially on locating and critically appraising the best clinical evidence in the medical literature. In its first four months, the rotation has been quite favorably received by both students and faculty, but will continue changing to keep pace with future curriculum alterations and new technology.