Archive for March, 2008

Electrical brain responses in language-impaired children reveal grammar-specific deficits.

Electrical brain responses in language-impaired children reveal grammar-specific deficits.
BACKGROUND: Scientific and public fascination with human language have included intensive scrutiny of language disorders as a new window onto the biological foundations of language and its evolutionary origins. Specific language impairment (SLI), which affects over 7% of children, is one such disorder. SLI […]

Automatic physiological waveform processing for FMRI noise correction and analysis.

Automatic physiological waveform processing for FMRI noise correction and analysis.
Functional MRI resting state and connectivity studies of brain focus on neural fluctuations at low frequencies which share power with physiological fluctuations originating from lung and heart. Due to the lack of automated software to process physiological signals collected at high magnetic fields, […]

Infection of semen-producing organs by SIV during the acute and chronic stages of the disease.

Infection of semen-producing organs by SIV during the acute and chronic stages of the disease.
BACKGROUND: Although indirect evidence suggests the male genital tract as a possible source of persistent HIV shedding in semen during antiretroviral therapy, this phenomenon is poorly understood due to the difficulty of sampling semen-producing organs in HIV+ asymptomatic […]

Small-bodied humans from Palau, Micronesia.

Small-bodied humans from Palau, Micronesia.
Newly discovered fossil assemblages of small bodied Homo sapiens from Palau, Micronesia possess characters thought to be taxonomically primitive for the genus Homo. BACKGROUND: Recent surface collection and test excavation in limestone caves in the rock islands of Palau, Micronesia, has produced a sizeable sample of human skeletal […]

Child mental representations of attachment when mothers are traumatized: The relationship of family-

Child mental representations of attachment when mothers are traumatized: The relationship of family-drawings to story-stem completion.
This study examines the relationship between child play-narratives and family drawings by children of violence-exposed mothers with posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). The Family Attachment Drawing Task (FAD-T) and MacArthur Story Stem Battery (MSSB) were administered. Of the […]

A novel high-capacity ion trap-quadrupole tandem mass spectrometer.

A novel high-capacity ion trap-quadrupole tandem mass spectrometer.
We describe a prototype tandem mass spectrometer that is designed to increase the efficiency of linked-scan analyses by >100-fold over conventional linked-scan instruments. The key element of the mass spectrometer is a novel high ion capacity ion trap, combined in tandem configuration with a quadrupole […]

Turbulence-induced square-root broadening of the Raman fiber laser output spectrum.

Turbulence-induced square-root broadening of the Raman fiber laser output spectrum.
The output characteristics of the conventional one-stage Raman fiber laser (RFL) are described in an optical wave turbulence formalism. Simple analytical expressions describing RFL output power and its spectral shape are presented, and square-root law for the output spectrum broadening law has been […]

Simultaneous time- and wavelength-resolved fluorescence spectroscopy for near real-time tissue diagn

Simultaneous time- and wavelength-resolved fluorescence spectroscopy for near real-time tissue diagnosis.
A novel fiber-optic-based method for simultaneous time- and wavelength-resolved fluorescence spectroscopy for the rapid diagnosis of diseased tissue is demonstrated. By combining multiple bandpass and dichroic filters (405/40, 460/50, and 550/50) with different lengths of optical fiber (1, 10, and 19 m) […]

Combined Mueller and Jones matrix method for the evaluation of the complex modulation in a liquid-cr

Combined Mueller and Jones matrix method for the evaluation of the complex modulation in a liquid-crystal-on-silicon display.
We apply the polar decomposition of the Mueller matrix describing a liquid-crystal-on-silicon display to identify the diattenuator, depolarizer, and retarder contributions as a function of the gray level. The retarder contribution is expressed in terms of […]

Scattering differentiates Alzheimer disease in vitro.

Scattering differentiates Alzheimer disease in vitro.
The molecular bases of Alzheimer disease and related neurodegenerative disorders are becoming better understood, but the means for definitive diagnosis and monitoring in vivo remain lacking. Near-infrared optical spectroscopy offers a potential solution. We acquired transmission and reflectance spectra of thin brain tissue slabs, from which we […]