Myocardial injury occurs earlier than myocardial inflammation in acute experimental viral myocarditis

Endomyocardial biopsy often fails to show myocardial inflammation for patients with clinically suspected myocarditis. The serum isoforms of troponin T (cTnT) level is a very sensitive marker of myocardial injury and it is elevated even in the absence of myocardial inflammation. We investigated the correlations for myocardial injury, virus titers and inflammation in acute viral infection. Using the murine coxsackievirus group B3 (CVB3) myocarditis model, the histopathologic findings and virus titers in mouse hearts were compared with the serum cTnT levels measured by ELISA at various time points. Viable virus titers in the hearts peaked at 3 days after infection (8.22 +/- 0.13 log10 PFU/100 mg of heart); they decreased at day 7 and no viable virus was detected from day 14. Myocardial inflammation was minimal at day 3, peaked at day 7 and markedly decreased at day 14. The individual serum TnT levels were significantly increased at day 3 (7.37 +/- 1.46 ng/ml), persisted to day 7 (0.73 +/- 0.08 ng/ml), and normalized at day 14. Serum cTnT levels were correlatable with virus titers in the heart (r = 0.744, P <0.01), but the serum cTnT levels were not correlated with the degrees of inflammation. Using the less myocarditic strain of CVB3, similar relationships were observed between the changes for the serum cTnT levels and the heart virus titers. During the course of viral infection, myocardial injury precedes the pathologic evidence of inflammation, and the elevated cTnT levels provide evidence of myocardial injury even in the absence of any histologic findings of myocarditis.     

Direct observation of Barkhausen avalanche in Co thin films

We report direct full-field magneto-optical observations of Barkhausen avalanches in Co polycrystalline thin films at criticality. We provide experimental evidence for the validity of a phenomenological model of the Barkhausen avalanche originally proposed by Cizeau, Zapperi, Durin, and Stanley [Phys. Rev. Lett. 79, 4669 (1997)]], where the model describes a 180 degrees -type flexible domain wall deformed by a localized defect with consideration of long-range dipolar interaction. The Barkhausen jump areas show a power-law scaling distribution with critical exponent tau approximately 1.33 for all the samples having different thickness from 5 to 50 nm, which is in accord with the two-dimensional prediction of the model.     

Global existence of the radially symmetric solutions of the Navier–Stokes equations for the isentropic compressible fluids

We study the isentropic compressible Navier–Stokes equations with radially symmetric data in an annular domain. We first prove the global existence and regularity results on the radially symmetric weak solutions with non‐negative bounded densities. Then we prove the global existence of radially symmetric strong solutions when the initial data ρ₀, u ₀ satisfy the compatibility condition for some radially symmetric g ∈ L². The initial density ρ₀ needs not be positive. We also prove some uniqueness results on the strong solutions. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The effect of polystyrene-block-poly(4-vinylpyridine) prepared by a RAFT method in the dispersion polymerization of styrene

The dispersion polymerization of styrene has been carried out using polystyrene-block-poly(4-vinylpyridine) copolymer [P(S-b-4VP)], prepared by a reversible addition-fragmentation chain transfer (RAFT) method, as a steric stabilizer in alcohol media. These block copolymer contains a long poly(4-vinylpyridine) block and a short polystyrene block. The stable spherical particles were obtained when the block copolymer concentrations increased from 2 to 20 wt.% relative to the monomer and the average particle sizes decreased from 340 to 200 nm with increasing concentration of the block copolymer. Alcoholic solvents, from methanol to n-hexanol, are responsible for the particle size. These results indicate that the poly(S-b-4VP) block copolymer is effective for providing polystyrene nano-sized particles with a low content of it working as a good stabilizer in any kind of alcoholic medium.     

Nano-sized polystyrene prepared using bifunctional vinyl urethane macromonomer in emulsion polymerization

The linear-type bifunctional vinyl urethane macromonomer (L-VUM: Mw; 40,453) was synthesized and applied to emulsion polymerization of styrene in DDI water. The structure of L-VUM was confirmed using ¹H NMR and FT-IR. The macromonomer served as a good nonionic surfactant resulted in stable polystyrene nanospheres. Polystyrene particles were prepared with various concentrations of macromonomoer (1–30 wt% refer to monomer), initiator (0.5–2 wt%) and different temperatures (60–80 °C). Monodisperse PS nanospheres with 30 wt% L-VUM have a number-average diameter (D_n) of 200 nm with good uniformity (1.011) and molecular weight (M_w) 231,180 g/mol. The particle morphology, molecular weight and distribution, uniformity and the stability of the nanospheres upon the reaction temperature and concentration of L-VUM will be thoroughly discussed.     

Spectral types of skewed Bernoulli shift

For the transformation for , it is proved that a real-valued function of modulus is not a multiplicative coboundary if the discontinuities of are -adic points and . It is also proved that the weakly mixing skew product transformations arising from Bernoulli shifts have Lebesgue spectrum.

     

Making and breaking covalent bonds across the magnetic transition in the giant magnetocaloric material Gd5(Si2Ge2)

A temperature-dependent, single crystal x-ray diffraction study of the giant magnetocaloric material, Gd5(Si2Ge2), across its Curie temperature (276 K) reveals that the simultaneous orthorhombic to monoclinic transition occurs by a shear mechanism in which the (Si, Ge)-(Si,Ge) dimers that are richer in Ge increase their distances by 0.859(3) A and lead to twinning. The structural transition changes the electronic structure, and provides an atomic-level model for the change in magnetic behavior with temperature in the Gd5(SixGe1-x)(4).     

Isolation of a Se-nitrososelenol: a new class of reactive nitrogen species relevant to protein Se-nitrosation

Nitric oxide (NO) is a messenger molecule implicated in a number of physiological processes. Nitrosation of selenoproteins has been suggested as playing an important role in NO-mediated cellular functions such as the inactivation of glutathione peroxidase (GPx), but no chemical information about Se-nitrosated species has been available to date. Here a stable Se-nitrososelenol (RSeNO), a new class of NO derivative, was synthesized and fully characterized by X-ray crystallography and spectroscopic methods. This Se-nitrososelenol can be formed by direct transnitrosation from an S-nitrosothiol to a selenol, as is the case in the proposed mechanism for the NO-mediated inactivation of GPx.     

Dimensions of very ample pluricanonical subsystems for compact quotients of bounded symmetric domains

A compact complex manifold X obtained by taking quotient of a bounded symmetric domain has an ample canonical line bundle. We prove that the dimension of very ample pluricanonical subsystem is strictly bigger than 2n, where n is the dimension of X. Received: 23 June 2000 / Revised version: 30 March 2001