Reactivity of the B-H Bond in tris(pyrazolyl)hydroborato zinc complexes: unexpected example of zinc hydride formation in a protic solvent and its relevance towards hydrogen transfer to NAD(+) mimics by tris(pyrazolyl)hydroborato zinc complexes in alcoholic media

Solutions of the zinc hydroxide complex [Tp(Bu(t),Me)]ZnOH in alcohols (ROH; R = Me, Et, Pr(i)) achieve hydride transfer to the NAD(+) model, 10-methylacridinium perchlorate. Deuterium labeling studies, however, demonstrate that the source of the hydride is not the alcohol but, rather, the B [bond] H group of the [Tp(Bu(t),Me)] ligand. A further example in which a [Tp(Bu(t),Me)] ligand acts as a hydride donor is provided by the reaction of the aqua complex [[Tp(Bu(t),Me)]Zn(OH(2))][HOB(C(6)F(5))(3)] with MeOH to generate the zinc hydride complex [Tp(Bu(t),Me)]ZnH. The present study therefore provides a caveat for the often assumed inertness of the B [bond] H group in tris(pyrazolyl)hydroborato ligands, especially in the presence of reactive cationic species.     

Great expectations: Specific lexical anticipation influences the processing of spoken language

Background  

Recently several studies have shown that people use contextual information to make predictions about the rest of the sentence or story as the text unfolds. Using event related potentials (ERPs) we tested whether these on-line predictions are based on a message-level representation of the discourse or on simple automatic activation by individual words. Subjects heard short stories that were highly constraining for one specific noun, or stories that were not specifically predictive but contained the same prime words as the predictive stories. To test whether listeners make specific predictions critical nouns were preceded by an adjective that was inflected according to, or in contrast with, the gender of the expected noun.     

Anomalous atomic hydrogen shock pattern in a supersonic plasma Jet

A two-photon laser-induced fluorescence study on the transport of ground-state atomic hydrogen in a supersonic plasma jet, generated from an Ar-H (2) mixture, reveals an unexpected shock pattern. Whereas both the axial-velocity profile and the temperature profile of hydrogen atoms along the jet centerline can be interpreted in terms of a supersonic expansion of an Ar-H gas mixture, the H-atom density profiles do not satisfy the well established Rankine-Hugoniot relation leading to a nonconservation of the forward flux. The experimental results show that H atoms escape from the supersonic expansion by a diffusion process due to strong density gradients between the core of the jet and its vicinity.     

Temporal/spatial resolution improvement of in vivo DCE-MRI with compressed sensing-optimized FLASH

Dynamic contrast-enhanced magnetic resonance imaging (DCE-MRI) provides critical information regarding tumor perfusion and permeability by injecting a T(1) contrast agent, such as Gd-DTPA, and making a time-resolved measurement of signal increase. Both temporal and spatial resolutions are required to be high to achieve an accurate and reproducible estimation of tumor perfusion. However, the dynamic nature of the DCE experiment limits simultaneous improvement of temporal and spatial resolution by conventional methods. Compressed sensing (CS) has become an important tool for the acceleration of imaging times in MRI, which is achieved by enabling the reconstruction of subsampled data. Similarly, CS algorithms can be utilized to improve the temporal/spatial resolution of DCE-MRI, and several works describing retrospective simulations have demonstrated the feasibility of such improvements. In this study, the fast low angle shot sequence was modified to implement a Cartesian, CS-optimized, sub-Nyquist phase encoding acquisition/reconstruction with multiple two-dimensional slice selections and was tested on water phantoms and animal tumor models. The mean voxel-level concordance correlation coefficient for Ak(ep) values obtained from ×4 and ×8 accelerated and the fully sampled data was 0.87±0.11 and 0.83±0.11, respectively (n=6), with optimized CS parameters. In this case, the reduction of phase encoding steps made possible by CS reconstruction improved effectively the temporal/spatial resolution of DCE-MRI data using an in vivo animal tumor model (n=6) and may be useful for the investigation of accelerated acquisitions in preclinical and clinical DCE-MRI trials.