Aldosterone plays a key role in maintaining the homeostasis of the whole organism. Under some circumstances, aldosterone can contribute to the progression of cardiovascular diseases, including coronary artery disease. This study demonstrates that aldosterone associates negatively with some lipidogram parameters and positively with the concentration of homocysteine. These associations are characteristic for coronary artery disease and are not present in control subjects. The findings also indicate that in vitro aldosterone stimulates homocysteine production by rat adrenal glands, which may explain the associations observed with coronary artery disease. Moreover, we have found that aldosterone significantly modulates in vitro platelet reactivity to arachidonate and collagen - aldosterone increases the pro-aggregatory action of collagen, but decreases the pro-aggregatory potential of arachidonate. Therefore, the findings of these in vitro and ex vivo experiments indicate the existence of new pathways by which aldosterone modulates lipid- homocysteine- and platelet-dependent atherogenesis., K. Karolczak, P. Kubalczyk, R. Glowacki, R. Pietruszynski, C. Watala., and Seznam literatury
Nitrogen-containing bisphosphonates were found to inhibit farnesyl diphosphate synthase - an essential enzyme in the cholesterol biosynthesis pathway, but their effect on cholesterol synthesis per se in the central nervous system (CNS) remains unknown. The aim of the present study was to examine possible influence of a representative agent alendronate on cholesterol synthesis rates in selected parts of rat CNS and on plasma cholesterol level. Two groups of rats were orally administered either alendronate (3 mg/kg b.w. ) or vehicle for 9 days. At the end of experiment, brain (basal ganglia, frontal cortex and hippocampus) and spinal cord were isolated and cholesterol synthesis was determined using the technique of deuterium incorporation from deuterated wa ter. In the alendronate group significant reductions of choleste rol synthesis rates were detected in frontal cortex, hippocampus and spinal cord (p<0.001). However, the experimental treatment did not produce a significant alteration in the levels of plasma cholesterol. In conclusion, this study brings the first experimental evidence of the inhibition of cholesterol biosynthesis with alendronate in central nervous system., Ľ. Cibičková, R. Hyšpler, N. Cibiček, E. Čermáková, V. Palička., and Obsahuje bibliografii
Attention decrease and an eventual micro-sleep of an artificial system operator is very dangerous and its early detection can prevent great losses. This work deals with an early detection of micro-sleep based on analysis of an electroencefalographic activity of tlie brain. There are classic spectral methods - the Discrete Fourier Transform and parametric methods - autoregressive models used for signal processing here. An influence of a band pass filter characteristic on classification is investigated. For the detection of the micro-sleep multi-layer perceptron, radial basis function (RBF) and the learning vector quantization (LVQ) neural networks are used. The k-nearest neighbor as a representative of non-parametric methods is examined. The last method used here is based on the Bayesian theory and its coefficients are found using the maximum likelihood estimation.
Několik příspěvků v tomto čísle cituje dílo A. Procy v souvislosti s problémem možné nenulové hmotnosti fotonu. Ukážeme zde, že dílo tohoto francouzského teoretického fyzika rumunského původu je mnohem rozsáhlejší. Byl skutečně významným a všestranným fyzikem., In this year we commemorate 60 years since the death of Alexandru Proca, one of the greatest physicists of the 20th century. He was a French scientist of Romanian origin. He developed the vector meson theory of nuclear forces and the relativistic quantum field equations which bear his name (Proca‘s equations) for the massive, vector spin-1 mesons., Ivo Kraus., and Obsahuje seznam literatury
Let T be an infinite locally finite tree. We say that T has exactly one end, if in T any two one-way infinite paths have a common rest (infinite subpath). The paper describes the structure of such trees and tries to formalize it by algebraic means, namely by means of acyclic monounary algebras or tree semilattices. In these algebraic structures the homomorpisms and direct products are considered and investigated with the aim of showing, whether they give algebras with the required properties. At the end some further assertions on the structure of such trees are stated, without the algebraic formalization.
Let $G$ be a $k$-connected graph with $k \ge 2$. A hinge is a subset of $k$ vertices whose deletion from $G$ yields a disconnected graph. We consider the algebraic connectivity and Fiedler vectors of such graphs, paying special attention to the signs of the entries in Fiedler vectors corresponding to vertices in a hinge, and to vertices in the connected components at a hinge. The results extend those in Fiedler's papers Algebraic connectivity of graphs (1973), A property of eigenvectors of nonnegative symmetric matrices and its application to graph theory (1975), and Kirkland and Fallat's paper Perron Components and Algebraic Connectivity for Weighted Graphs (1998).