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The efficient storage of energy combined with a minimum carbon footprint is still considered one of the major challenges towards the transition to a progressive, sustainable and environmental friendly society on a global scale. The energy storage in pure chemical form using gas carriers with high heating values, including H-2 and CH4, as well as via electrochemical means using state-of-the-art devices, such as batteries or supercapacitors, are two of the most attractive alternatives for the combustion of finite, carbon-rich and environmentally harmful fossil fuels, such as diesel and gasoline. A few-step, reproducible and scalable method is presented in this study for the preparation of an ultra-microporous (average pore size around 0.6 nm) activated carbon cloth (ACC) with large specific area ( GT 1200 m(2)/g) and pore volume (similar to 0.5 cm(3)/g) upon combining chemical impregnation, carbonization and CO2 activation of a low-cost cellulose-based polymeric fabric. The ACC material shows a versatile character towards three different applications, including H2 storage via cryo-adsorption, separation of energy-dense CO2/CH4 mixtures via selective adsorption and electrochemical energy storage using super-capacitor technology. Fully reversible H-2 uptake capacities in excess of 3.1 wt% at 77 K and similar to 72 bar along with a significant heat of adsorption value of up to 8.4 kJ/mol for low surface coverage have been found. Upon incorporation of low-pressure sorption data in the ideal adsorbed solution theory model, the ACC is predicted to selectively adsorb about 4.5 times more CO2 than CH4 in ambient conditions and thus represents an appealing adsorbent for the purification of such gaseous mixtures. Finally, an electric double-layer capacitor device was assembled and tested for its electrochemical performance, constructed of binder-free and flexible ACC electrodes and aqueous CsCl electrolyte. The full-cell exhibits a gravimetric capacitance of similar to 121 F/g for a specific current of 0.02 A/g, which relative to the ACCs specific area, is superior to commercially available activated carbons. A capacitance retention of more than 97% was observed after 10,000 charging/discharging cycles, thus indicating the ACCs suitability for demanding and high-performance energy storage on a commercial scale. The enhanced performance in all tested applications seems to be attributed to the mean ultra-micropore size of the ACC material instead of the available specific area and/or pore volume.

The complex hierarchical structure in biological and synthetic fibrous nanocomposites entails considerable difficulties in the interpretation of the crystallographic texture from diffraction data. Here, we present a novel reconstruction method to obtain the 3D distribution of fibres in such systems. An analytical expression is derived for the diffraction intensity from fibres, explaining the azimuthal intensity distribution in terms of the angles of the three dimensional fibre orientation distributions. The telson of stomatopod (mantis shrimp) serves as an example of natural biological armour whose high impact resistance property is believed to arise from the hierarchical organization of alpha chitin nanofibrils into fibres and twisted plywood (Bouligand) structures at the sub-micron and micron scale. Synchrotron microfocus scanning X-ray diffraction data on stomatopod telson were used as a test case to map the 3D fibre orientation across the entire tissue section. The method is applicable to a range of biological and biomimetic structures with graded 3D fibre texture at the sub-micron and micron length scales.

Estrogen receptor alpha (ERalpha) is a modular protein of the steroid/nuclear receptor family of transcriptional regulators that upon binding to the hormone undergoes structural changes, resulting in its nuclear translocation and docking to specific chromatin sites. In the nucleus, ERalpha assembles in multiprotein complexes that act as final effectors of estrogen signaling to the genome through chromatin remodeling and epigenetic modifications, leading to dynamic and coordinated regulation of hormone-responsive genes. Identification of the molecular partners of ERalpha and understanding their combinatory interactions within functional complexes is a prerequisite to define the molecular basis of estrogen control of cell functions. To this end, affinity purification was applied to map and characterize the ERalpha interactome in hormone-responsive human breast cancer cell nuclei. MCF-7 cell clones expressing human ERalpha fused to a tandem affinity purification tag were generated and used to purify native nuclear ER-containing complexes by IgG-Sepharose affinity chromatography and glycerol gradient centrifugation. Purified complexes were analyzed by two-dimensional DIGE and mass spectrometry, leading to the identification of a ligand-dependent multiprotein complex comprising beta-actin, myosins, and several proteins involved in actin filament organization and dynamics and/or known to participate in actin-mediated regulation of gene transcription, chromatin dynamics, and ribosome biogenesis. Time course analyses indicated that complexes containing ERalpha and actin are assembled in the nucleus early after receptor activation by ligands, and gene knockdown experiments showed that gelsolin and the nuclear isoform of myosin 1c are key determinants for assembly and/or stability of these complexes. Based on these results, we propose that the actin network plays a role in nuclear ERalpha actions in breast cancer cells, including coordinated regulation of target gene activity, spatial and functional reorganization of chromatin, and ribosome biogenesis.

The number of mobile-connected devices has been growing at a tremendous rate in recent years. These increasingly powerful tablets and smartphones are portable and personal, giving advertisers the potential to reach consumers on a one-on-one basis with personalized advertisements based on location, recent behaviors, and much more. A substantial difference between mobile media usage and mobile advertising spending suggests a significant growth opportunity in the mobile advertising market. Our work involves improving the decision-making technology used by Advertising.com, a large online advertising network, as it attempts to increase its presence in the mobile advertising market. We examined the factors that differentiate mobile consumers in order to target them more effectively, and drive the direction of Advertising.com's future mobile optimization technology development. Data was available to us from Advertising.com's back-end database, as well as in its front-end campaign reporting system. To investigate this data and determine the most valuable mobile variables, we performed data analysis utilizing tools including Microsoft Excel, R, SQL, and Minitab. We also leveraged Advertising.com's existing decision algorithm, AdLearn, as well as looked to existing mobile advertising studies. Our analyses indicate several factors are influential in the effectiveness of mobile advertisements including hour of day, day of week and device type. We found that mobile campaigns perform best during the morning hours and late at night in terms of both impressions and conversions. Also, we found that weekends have statistically superior conversion rates.

Virtual agency, the perceived intentional initiation of movement by an amputee of his or her phantom limb, can help reduce pain associated with the missing limb. One key aspect of enhancing virtual agency may lie in recreating a realistic residual limb in an immersive virtual environment. The apparatus described herein seeks to track an amputee's residual forearm and virtually render its restored movement. Specifically, magnetic position sensors and surface electromyography signals are used to track the absolute position of the residual forearm and the intentional grasp from the residual muscles. This information is inputted to software that creates the visual rendering. In the X3D virtual environment, the amputee user interacts with balls in a task that involves picking up one of six colored balls and dropping it into a bin. The image is produced by reflecting projected light off of a mirror and onto a tabletop where the user views the virtual environment. Use case studies indicate that this device can successfully detect when a user attempts to grasp his or her hand and provides visual feedback collocating the virtual limb with the missing limb. Thus, this device gives the user a sense of proprioceptive control of his or her phantom limb, enhancing virtual agency, and increasing the likelihood pain relief.

Mirror box therapy helps reduce phantom limb pain by enhancing virtual agency, the intentional initiation of movement by an amputee of his or her missing limb. However, mirror box therapy is limited by a restriction to symmetrical movement and by the lack of user interaction with objects, making it difficult for the user to remain engaged. As an emerging therapy, the addition of virtual reality more readily offers an environment that is immersive and reconfigurable. The virtual reality therapy described herein seeks to provide an engaging, therapeutic illusion that allows asymmetric limb movement. In the virtual environment, the amputee user interacts with balls in a task that involves picking up one of six colored balls and dropping the ball into a bin. The image is produced by reflecting projected light off of a mirror and onto a tabletop where the user views virtual environment. The particular training procedures were designed to incorporate two separately controllable motor actions, afford immersive feedback through the visual channel, give the user a sense of hand to object interaction, and account for user comfort and sustained attention engagement. This task poses minimal strain on the residual limb and minimizes the number of non-invasive sensors. Future testing will determine the device's effectiveness in alleviating phantom limb pain in transradial individuals.

The high-performance potential of parallel and distributed computation can only be realized with significant computation speed-ups from the coordinated action of many processors. A basic problem that has to be addressed, in order to realize this potential, is the unreliability of the resulting (highly complex) systems of many processors. The research of N00014-91-J-1613 'Principles of Fault-Tolerant and Efficient Parallel Computation bas focused, primarily. on the algorithmic Principles of fault-tolerant and efficient parallel computing. The desirable combination of reliability and performance is nontrivial since efficiency implies removing redundancy, whereas fault-tolerance requires adding some redundancy to computations

Endoscopic dilatation using a high pressure balloon is a widely used technique for the treatment of strictures of the urinary tract secondary to surgery in adult patient. Several studies have evaluated its usage in the treatment of primary and secondary strictures of the urinary tract of child with a disparity of results.Evaluate Effectiveness and Safetiness of high pressure balloon dilatation and double "J" implantation in the treatment of postsurgical strictures of urinary tract in children.Retrospective study of endoscopic dilatation of secondary to surgery strictures performed in our unit during the last past 18 months. Demographical data, surgical records, symptoms, renal function, dilatation technique, postsurgery complications and ultrasonography and isotopic data (pre and post dilatation) were evaluated.Six children, aged 13 months-9 years (media = 4.3 years) were treated in our unit. Four presented ureteropelvic junction obstruction (UPO) after Anderson-Hynes pyeloplasty and 2 vesico-ureteral junction stenosis (VUO) in 3 reimplants units, (one with Cohen tecnique and two with Politano tecnique). All 6 patients showed dilatation of urinary tract and isotopic diuretic renogram prior to dilatation that showed for all cases an obstructed pattern with T1/220 minutes. Two of the children presented lumbar pain and one of them had suffered an urine infection. Time interval between surgery and dilatation varied between 23 and 118 months. Surgical technique used for all cases was high pressure retrograde balloon dilatation and placement of double "J" before retrograde pielography. In all patients a double J catheter was implanted and left in place for 4 to 9 weeks. Technical inability to place the catheter after the expansion forced to the accomplishment of a percutaneus nephrostomy echo guided in one case. One of the children showed hematuria up to 7 days after dilatation procedure. Hospilatization varied between 24 hours to 10 days being (moda = 3 days). The patient that needed nephrostomy underwent ulterior sucessful dilatation 4 months after first procedure. The 2 children presenting vesico-ureteral junction stricture underwent calibration 10 and 12 months after dilatation, showing both good caliber. Diuretic renogram curve Improvement was confirmed for all patients but one of the VUO children that showed renal function deterioration after dilatation procedure. Lumbar pain disappear for both 2 children that had referred it.Endoscopic dilatation of strictures of urinary tract using balloon in children that were previously sommeted to surgical interventions is technically available and shows good results in the short-medium term with low index of post procedural complications, so, it should be considered as initial treatment for these patients.

Luminal-like breast tumor cells express estrogen receptor alpha (ERalpha), a member of the nuclear receptor family of ligand-activated transcription factors that controls their proliferation, survival, and functional status. To identify the molecular determinants of this hormone-responsive tumor phenotype, a comprehensive genome-wide analysis was performed in estrogen stimulated MCF-7 and ZR-75.1 cells by integrating time-course mRNA expression profiling with global mapping of genomic ERalpha binding sites by chromatin immunoprecipitation coupled to massively parallel sequencing, microRNA expression profiling, and in silico analysis of transcription units and receptor binding regions identified. All 1270 genes that were found to respond to 17beta-estradiol in both cell lines cluster in 33 highly concordant groups, each of which showed defined kinetics of RNA changes. This hormone-responsive gene set includes several direct targets of ERalpha and is organized in a gene regulation cascade, stemming from ligand-activated receptor and reaching a large number of downstream targets via AP-2gamma, B-cell activating transcription factor, E2F1 and 2, E74-like factor 3, GTF2IRD1, hairy and enhancer of split homologue-1, MYB, SMAD3, RARalpha, and RXRalpha transcription factors. MicroRNAs are also integral components of this gene regulation network because miR-107, miR-424, miR-570, miR-618, and miR-760 are regulated by 17beta-estradiol along with other microRNAs that can target a significant number of transcripts belonging to one or more estrogen-responsive gene clusters.

Microarray-based gene expression profiling is well suited for parallel quantitative analysis of large numbers of RNAs, but its application to cancer biopsies, formalin-fixed paraffin-embedded (FFPE) archived tissues in particular, is limited by the poor quality of the RNA recovered. This represents a serious drawback, since FFPE tumor tissue banks are available with clinical and prognostic annotations, which could be exploited for molecular profiling studies, provided that reliable analytical technologies are found. We applied and evaluated here a microarray-based cDNA-mediated annealing, selection, extension and ligation (DASL) assay for analysis of 502 mRNAs in highly degraded total RNA extracted from cultured cells or FFPE breast cancer biopsies. The study included quantitative and qualitative comparison of data obtained by analysis of the same RNAs with genome-wide oligonucleotide microarrays vs. DASL arrays and, by DASL, before and after extensive in vitro RNA fragmentation. The DASL-based expression profiling assay applied to RNA extracted from MCF-7 cells before or after 24 hours stimulation with a mitogenic dose of 17β-estradiol consistently allowed to detect hormone-induced gene expression changes also following extensive RNA degradation in vitro. Comparable results where obtained with tumor RNA extracted from FFPE breast cancer biopsies (6 to 19 years old). The method proved itself sensitive, reproducible and accurate, when compared with results obtained by microarray analysis of RNA extracted from snap-frozen tissue of the same tumor.

Estrogen receptor α (ER-α) is a key mediator of estrogen actions in breast cancer (BC) cells. Understanding the effects of ligand-activated ER-α in target cells requires identification of the molecular partners acting in concert with this nuclear receptor to transduce the hormonal signal. We applied tandem affinity purification (TAP), glycerol gradient centrifugation and MS analysis to isolate and identify proteins interacting with ligand-activated ER-α in MCF-7 cell nuclei. This led to the identification of 264 ER-associated proteins, whose functions highlight the hinge role of ER-α in the coordination of multiple hormone-regulated nuclear processes in BC cells.

The thermostable β-xylosidase from Sulfolobus solfataricus , expressed in Escherichia coli , was immobilized by entrapment into alginate with full recovery of activity and tested for xylose production from xylan hydrolysates. Since the recombinant activity was also cell bound, alginate beads entrapping E. coli whole cells were also prepared. The immobilized preparations exhibited higher thermostability at 90 °C compared to their free counterparts. The half-lives of the immobilized enzyme and cells were 21 and 23 h, respectively, while half of the inactivation was reached after 10 and 11.5 h for free enzyme and whole cells. Interestingly, thermophilicity increased from 85 up to 100 °C and the optimal pH shifted to higher values for immobilized preparations. Results obtained from xylo-oligosaccharides hydrolysis in subsequent batch experiments of recycling, indicated that the immobilized enzyme had good operational stability, retaining 84% of its initial activity after four cycles. Here we report on the immobilization of the β-xylosidase into alginate and its characterization.

Estrogen receptors α (ER-α) and β (ER-β) play distinct biological roles in onset and progression of hormone-responsive breast cancer, with ER-β exerting a modulatory activity on ER-α-mediated estrogen signaling and stimulation of cell proliferation by mechanisms still not fully understood. We stably expressed human ER-β fused to a tandem affinity purification-tag in estrogen-responsive MCF-7 cells and applied tandem affinity purification and nanoLC-MS/MS to identify the ER-β interactome of this cell type. Functional annotation by bioinformatics analyses of the 303 proteins that co-purify with ER-β from nuclear extracts identify several new molecular partners of this receptor subtype that represents nodal points of a large protein network controlling multiple processes and functions in breast cancer cells.

Estrogen effects on mammary epithelial and breast cancer (BC) cells are mediated by the nuclear receptors ERα and ERβ, transcription factors that display functional antagonism with each other, with ERβ acting as oncosuppressor and interfering with the effects of ERα on cell proliferation, tumor promotion and progression. Indeed, hormone-responsive, ERα+ BC cells often lack ERβ, which when present associates with a less aggressive clinical phenotype of the disease. Recent evidences point to a significant role of microRNAs (miRNAs) in BC, where specific miRNA expression profiles associate with distinct clinical and biological phenotypes of the lesion. Considering the possibility that ERβ might influence BC cell behavior via miRNAs, we compared miRNome expression in ERβ+ vs ERβ- hormone-responsive BC cells and found a widespread effect of this ER subtype on the expression pattern of these non-coding RNAs. More importantly, the expression pattern of 67 miRNAs, including 10 regulated by ERβ in BC cells, clearly distinguishes ERβ+, node-negative, from ERβ-, metastatic, mammary tumors. Molecular dissection of miRNA biogenesis revealed multiple mechanisms for direct regulation of this process by ERβ+ in BC cell nuclei. In particular, ERβ downregulates miR-30a by binding to two specific sites proximal to the gene and thereby inhibiting pri-miR synthesis. On the other hand, the receptor promotes miR-23b, -27b and 24-1 accumulation in the cell by binding in close proximity of the corresponding gene cluster and preventing in situ the inhibitory effects of ERα on pri-miR maturation by the p68/DDX5-Drosha microprocessor complex. These results indicate that cell autonomous regulation of miRNA expression is part of the mechanism of action of ERβ in BC cells and could contribute to establishment or maintenance of a less aggressive tumor phenotype mediated by this nuclear receptor.