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The use of bone density measurements is of central importance for diagnosis, prognosis end the assessment of treatment of patients with osteoorosis. Risk factors are variables which significantly change expected absolute risk, that is, the probability of variable disease in a certain population. Aging and smoking are the most common listed risk factors for the development of osteoporosis. The aim of our work was to confirm the most common risk factors for osteoporosis. In our research work has processed a total of 88 smokers were divided into groups according to the number of cigarettes smoked and the length of smokers. Results showed that risk factors: poor life habits (smoking and use of coffee), are significantly represented on patients with osteoporosis. In order to timely implement treatment, we concluded based on the results, that there is a need actively look for presence of risk factors responsible for osteoporosis in our patients.

A computed tomography (CT) imaging system using monochromatic sub-terahertz coherent electromagnetic waves generated from a device constructed from the intrinsic Josephson junctions in a single crystalline mesa structure of the high-Tc superconductor Bi2Sr2CaCu2O8+δ was developed and tested on three samples: Standing metallic rods supported by styrofoam, a dried plant (heart pea) containing seeds, and a plastic doll inside an egg shell. The images obtained strongly suggest that this CT imaging system may be useful for a variety of practical applications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A reflection type of imaging system is shown at sub-terahertz frequencies generated from high-Tcsuperconducting intrinsic Josephson junction mesa structures fabricated by single crystalline Bi2Sr2CaCu2O8+δ to demonstrate how the sub-terahertz imaging technique using monochromatic radiation is powerful and unique for the variety of practical applications. Several examples are discussed in detail and are compared to other terahertz imaging systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The anisotropy of the vortex liquid and vortex solid phases in Bi2Sr2CaCu2O8+δ single crystal placed in tilted magnetic fields is studied by the in-plane resistivity measurements probing the true bulk properties by using the Corbino geometry of the electrical contacts. It is found that the anisotropy parameter jumps at the vortex lattice melting transition, implying the different dimensionality of the vortex solid and the vortex liquid phases. With increasing magnetic field deeper in the vortex liquid phase, the anisotropy gradually decreases without dramatic changes. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

The vortex-lattice melting transition in Bi2Sr2CaCu2O8+δ single crystals is studied by the simultaneous in-plane Rab and out-of-plane Rc resistivity measurements by using the Corbino transformer contact configuration to avoid the surface barrier effects. It is shown that both the in-plane and out-of-plane resistivity measurements give close values of the vortex-lattice melting field in a wide angular range, while the drastical difference of the resistivity onsets of Rab and Rc has been found near the ab-plane. The observed behavior is discussed in the context of the complex vortex-lattice–vortex-smectic–vortex-liquid phase transition or as an alternative by involving the transition from the crossing vortex-lattice to the tilted vortex-lattice near the ab-plane. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

The human capacity to imagine possible future events unintentionally, with minimal cognitive effort, is termed spontaneous future thought (SFT). This paper addresses an important theoretical question for cognitive science: What are the possible cognitive mechanisms underlying such SFT experiences? We contrasted three hypotheses present in the literature: the online construction hypothesis, the recasting hypothesis, and the memories of future thoughts hypothesis. Study 1 (N = 41) used novel subjective ratings which challenged the recasting mechanism: SFTs were mostly rated as dissimilar to autobiographical memories, suggesting they are not simply past experiences 'recast' as future events. Study 2 (N = 90) used a novel experimental paradigm, comparing effects of voluntary episodic future constructions and non-personal narratives upon subsequent spontaneous thought sampling. Results suggested that voluntary future constructions remain accessible to spontaneous retrieval, supporting the memories of future thoughts hypothesis. This finding, and other data presented across the two studies, still indicates a role for online construction processes in SFT, but further empirical work is needed to clarify how and when constructive processes are engaged in SFT. Taken together, these two studies represent initial efforts to elucidate the mechanisms underlying SFT, providing the first proof-of-principle that deliberately envisioned future events can reappear, without intention, in consciousness at some later time, and further supporting the dual process account of future thinking. These methods and findings provide a firm basis for subsequent experimental and longitudinal research on SFT., Competing Interests: Declaration of competing interest None., (Copyright © 2024 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.)

Using scanning tunneling microscopy and spectroscopy we demonstrate a revival of magnetism in 7-armchair nanoribbon by unpassivated atoms at the termini. Namely, a pair of intense Kondo resonances emerges at the peripheries of zigzag terminus revealing the many-body screening effects of local magnetic moments. Although Kondo resonance originates from a missing local orbital, it extends to a distance of 2.5 nm along the edge of the ribbon. The results are complemented by density functional theory calculations which suggest a possible coupling between Kondo states despite screening effects of substrate electrons. These findings indicate a possibility to restore intrinsic magnetic ordering in graphene nanoribbon without major structural modifications., (© 2024. The Author(s).)

We examine the role of off-line memory consolidation processes in the learning and retention of a new quasi-regular linguistic system similar to the English past tense. Quasi-regular systems are characterized by a dominance of systematic, regular forms (e.g., walk-walked, jump-jumped) alongside a smaller number of high frequency irregulars (e.g., sit-sat, go-went), and are found across many cognitive domains, from spelling-sound mappings to inflectional morphology to semantic cognition. Participants were trained on the novel morphological system using an artificial language paradigm, and then tested after different delays. Based on a complementary systems account of memory, we predicted that irregular forms would show stronger off-line changes due to consolidation processes. Across two experiments, participants were tested either immediately after learning, 12 h later with or without sleep, or 24 h later. Testing involved generalization of the morphological patterns to previously unseen words (both experiments) as well as recall of the trained words (Experiment 2). In generalization, participants showed 'default' regularization across a range of novel forms, as well as irregularization for previously unseen items that were similar to unique high-frequency irregular trained forms. Both patterns of performance remained stable across the delays. Generalizations involving competing tendencies to regularize and irregularize were balanced between the two immediately after learning. Crucially, at both 12-h delays the tendency to irregularize in these cases was strengthened, with further strengthening after 24 h. Consolidated knowledge of both regular and irregular trained items contributed significantly to generalization performance, with evidence of strengthening of irregular forms and weakening of regular forms. We interpret these findings in the context of a complementary systems model, and discuss how maintenance, strengthening, and forgetting of the new memories across sleep and wake can play a role in acquiring quasi-regular systems., (Copyright © 2018 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier Ltd.. All rights reserved.)

How are relationships between concepts affected by the interplay between short-term contextual constraints and long-term conceptual knowledge? Across two studies we investigate the consequence of changes in visual context for the dynamics of conceptual processing. Participants' eye movements were tracked as they viewed a visual depiction of e.g. a canary in a birdcage (Experiment 1), or a canary and three unrelated objects, each in its own quadrant (Experiment 2). In both studies participants heard either a semantically and contextually similar "robin" (a bird; similar size), an equally semantically similar but not contextually similar "stork" (a bird; bigger than a canary, incompatible with the birdcage), or unrelated "tent". The changing patterns of fixations across time indicated first, that the visual context strongly influenced the eye movements such that, in the context of a birdcage, early on (by word offset) hearing "robin" engendered more looks to the canary than hearing "stork" or "tent" (which engendered the same number of looks), unlike in the context of unrelated objects (in which case "robin" and "stork" engendered equivalent looks to the canary, and more than did "tent"). Second, within the 500 ms post-word-offset eye movements in both experiments converged onto a common pattern (more looks to the canary after "robin" than after "stork", and for both more than after "tent"). We interpret these findings as indicative of the dynamics of activation within semantic memory accessed via pictures and via words, and reflecting the complex interaction between systems representing context-independent and context-dependent conceptual knowledge driven by predictive processing., (Copyright © 2018 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.)

We examined the role of sleep-related memory consolidation processes in learning new form-meaning mappings. Specifically, we examined a Complementary Learning Systems account, which implies that sleep-related consolidation should be more beneficial for new hippocampally dependent arbitrary mappings (e.g. new vocabulary items) relative to new systematic mappings (e.g. grammatical regularities), which can be better encoded neocortically. The hypothesis was tested using a novel language with an artificial grammatical gender system. Stem-referent mappings implemented arbitrary aspects of the new language, and determiner/suffix+natural gender mappings implemented systematic aspects (e.g. tib scoiffesh + ballerina, tib mofeem + bride; ked jorool + cowboy, ked heefaff + priest). Importantly, the determiner-gender and the suffix-gender mappings varied in complexity and salience, thus providing a range of opportunities to detect beneficial effects of sleep for this type of mapping. Participants were trained on the new language using a word-picture matching task, and were tested after a 2-hour delay which included sleep or wakefulness. Participants in the sleep group outperformed participants in the wake group on tests assessing memory for the arbitrary aspects of the new mappings (individual vocabulary items), whereas we saw no evidence of a sleep benefit in any of the tests assessing memory for the systematic aspects of the new mappings: Participants in both groups extracted the salient determiner-natural gender mapping, but not the more complex suffix-natural gender mapping. The data support the predictions of the complementary systems account and highlight the importance of the arbitrariness/systematicity dimension in the consolidation process for declarative memories.

Purpose: Optimal analgesia in ambulatory urology patients still remains a challenge. The aim of this study was to examine if the pre-emptive use of intravenous tramadol can reduce pain after ureteroscopic lithotripsy in patients diagnosed with unilateral ureteral stones., Materials and Methods: This prospective pilot cohort study included 74 patients diagnosed with unilateral ureteral stones who underwent ureteroscopic lithotripsy under general anesthesia in the Urology Clinic at the Clinical Center of Serbia from March to June 2012. All patients were randomly allocated to two groups: one group (38 patients) received intravenous infusion of tramadol 100 mg in 500 mL 0.9%NaCl one hour before the procedure, while the other group (36 patients) received 500 mL 0.9%NaCl at the same time. Visual analogue scale (VAS) scores were recorded once prior to surgery and two times after the surgery (1 h and 6 h, respectively). The patients were prescribed additional postoperative analgesia (diclofenac 75 mg i.m.) when required. Pre-emptive effects of tramadol were assessed measuring pain scores, VAS1 and VAS2, intraoperative fentanyl consumption, and postoperative analgesic requirement., Results: The average VAS1 score in the tramadol group was significantly lower than that in the non-tramadol group. The difference in average VAS2 score values between the two groups was not statistically significant; however, there were more patients who experienced severe pain in the non-tramadol group (p<0.01). The number of patients that required postoperative analgesia was not statistically different between the groups., Conclusion: Pre-emptive tramadol did reduce early postoperative pain. The patients who received pre-emptive tramadol were less likely to experience severe post-operative pain.

The utterance planning processes allowing speakers to produce agreement between subjects and verbs ( the cats pl are pl asleep ) have been the topic of extensive study as a window into language production mechanisms. A key question has been the extent to which agreement processing is influenced by semantic and phonological factors. Most prior studies have found limited effects of non-syntactic, particularly phonological factors, leading to conclusions that agreement is computed by a process influenced strongly by syntactic factors and with only a minor contribution of semantics. This conclusion may have been influenced by use of agreement error data as the main dependent variable, because errors are rare, potentially reducing sensitivity to the interaction of several factors. Two studies investigate agreement processing in Serbian, which allows both singular and plural verb forms to agree with plural nouns in some constructions. We use these constructions to further investigate the contribution of semantic factors to agreement, by manipulating levels of individuation of the members of a set. In addition, we investigate the effect of morphophonological homophony onto the participants' productions of agreeing forms. The findings are discussed in the context of three models of agreement (Marking & Morphing, competition and controller misidentification), which differ in the extent to which they allow the influence of non-syntactic factors on agreement. We also compare the behavioral findings with the predictions of four computational implementations of the Marking & Morphing account. We discuss the implications of the behavioral and computational findings for models of agreement and the language production more broadly. Rosemary: Some biscuits or a piece of cake… 'goes' or 'go' better with an afternoon tea?

This work investigates production preferences in different languages. Specifically, it examines how animacy, competition processes, and language-specific constraints shape speakers' choices of structure. English, Spanish and Serbian speakers were presented with depicted events in which either an animate or inanimate entity was acted upon by an agent. Questions about the affected participant in these events prompted the production of relative clauses identifying these entities (e.g., the bag the woman is punching). Results indicated that in English, animacy plays a strong role in determining the choice of passive structures. In contrast, it plays a less prominent role in Spanish and Serbian structure choices, where more active structures were produced to varying degrees. Critically, the semantic similarity between the agent and the patient of the event correlated with the omission of the agent in all languages, indicating that competition resulted in the agent's inhibition. Similarity also correlated with different functional choices in Spanish. The results suggest that similarity-based competition may influence various stages of production planning but its manifestations are constrained by language-specific grammatical options. Implications for models of sentence production and the relationship between production and comprehension are discussed., (Copyright © 2012 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.)

Inflectional morphology has been taken as a paradigmatic example of rule-governed grammatical knowledge (Pinker, 1999). The plausibility of this claim may be related to the fact that it is mainly based on studies of English, which has a very simple inflectional system. We examined the representation of inflectional morphology in Serbian, which encodes number, gender, and case for nouns. Linguists standardly characterize this system as a complex set of rules, with disagreements about their exact form. We present analyses of a large corpus of nouns which showed that, as in English, Serbian inflectional morphology is quasiregular: It exhibits numerous partial regularities creating neighborhoods that vary in size and consistency. We then asked whether a simple connectionist network could encode this statistical information in a manner that also supported generalization. A network trained on 3,244 Serbian nouns learned to produce correctly inflected phonological forms from a specification of a word's lemma, gender, number, and case, and generalized to untrained cases. The model's performance was sensitive to variables that also influence human performance, including surface and lemma frequency. It was also influenced by inflectional neighborhood size, a novel measure of the consistency of meaning to form mapping. A word-naming experiment with native Serbian speakers showed that this measure also affects human performance. The results suggest that, as in English, generating correctly inflected forms involves satisfying a small number of simultaneous probabilistic constraints relating form and meaning. Thus, common computational mechanisms may govern the representation and use of inflectional information across typologically diverse languages., (Copyright © 2011 Cognitive Science Society, Inc.)

We identify a number of principles with respect to prediction that, we argue, underpin adult language comprehension: (a) comprehension consists in realizing a mapping between the unfolding sentence and the event representation corresponding to the real-world event being described; (b) the realization of this mapping manifests as the ability to predict both how the language will unfold, and how the real-world event would unfold if it were being experienced directly; (c) concurrent linguistic and nonlinguistic inputs, and the prior internal states of the system, each drive the predictive process; (d) the representation of prior internal states across a representational substrate common to the linguistic and nonlinguistic domains enables the predictive process to operate over variable time frames and variable levels of representational abstraction. We review empirical data exemplifying the operation of these principles and discuss the relationship between prediction, event structure, thematic role assignment, and incrementality.

Although inflectional morphology has been the focus of considerable debate in recent years, most research has focused on English, which has a much simpler inflectional system than in many other languages. We have been studying Serbian, which has a complex inflectional system that encodes gender, number, and case. The present study investigated the representation of gender. In standard theories of language production, gender is treated as an abstract syntactic feature segregated from semantic and phonological factors. However, we describe corpus analyses and computational models which indicate that gender is correlated with semantic and phonological information, consistent with other cross-linguistic studies. The research supports the idea that gender representations emerge in the course of learning to map from an intended message to a phonological representation. Implications for models of speech production are discussed.