Effects of sodium salicylate on the febrile response and increased levels of cyclic AMP in cerebrospinal fluid during endogenous pyrogen-induced fever in rabbits

To further evaluate the causality between endogenous pyrogen (EP)-induced fever and cyclic adenosine-3',5'-monophosphate (cyclic AMP) level, the effects of sodium salicylate (SS) on the febrile response and increased levels of cyclic AMP in both cerebrospinal fluid (c.s.f.) and plasma during EP-induced fever in rabbits were observed. The results suggest that cyclic AMP is probably involved in the central mediation of EP-induced fever and that increased concentration of cyclic AMP in c.s.f. associated with EP-induced fever is not the result of temperature elevation but appears to be caused by the increased synthesis in the central nervous system. In addition it is confirmed that blood is impossibly a contributory source of increased cyclic AMP in c.s.f. during EP fever, and that SS may act subsequent to the increase in cyclic AMP.     

Structure and superconductivity in FexCu1−xBa2YCu2O7+y superconductors synthesized by high pressure

Comprehensive studies of X-ray diffraction, oxygen content, superconductivity and Mössbauer effect have been made on Fe_xCu_1−xBa₂YCu₂O_7+y superconductors (0.00≤x≤0.70) synthesized by ambient (AM) and high pressure (HP). Results indicate that all the HP-samples have tetragonal structure, smaller lattice parameter c and unit-cell volume than the AM-samples. The studies of oxygen content, and Mössbauer spectroscopy indicate that the HP-samples have higher oxygen content, carrier concentration and average valence of Fe than the AM-samples. Moreover, for the HP-samples more Fe atoms located in CuO_x chains have fivefold-oxygen coordination. These are important reasons for the enhancement of T_c in the HP-samples.     

Liquid–gas critical phenomena under confinement: small-angle neutron scattering studies of CO2 in aerogel

Small angle neutron scattering (SANS) is a well-established technique for investigating the behavior of confined binary liquid solutions, as it can probe the correlation length and susceptibility in pores on length scales 1 – 100 nm. We applied SANS to explore the influence of confinement on critical behavior of an individual fluid carbon dioxide (CO₂) in a highly porous aerogel. The results demonstrate that quenched disorder induced by aerogel significantly depresses density fluctuations. Despite the negligible volume occupied by aerogel (< 4%), the macroscopic phase separation of confined CO₂ into coexisting liquid and gaseous phases is suppressed and below the critical temperature of the bulk fluid frozen methastable microdomains are formed. Experimental data show that critical adsorption is as important as the effect of confinement in defining the behavior of confined fluids.     

An electron spin resonance study of radical decay in γ-ray irradiated pepper by thermal treatments

Applied Magnetic Resonance - We examined by electron spin resonance (ESR) spectroscopy the thermal decay of radicals as induced by γ-irradiation on pepper. Upon irradiation, the satellite...     

Substructuring preconditioners for saddle-point problems arising from Maxwell's equations in three dimensions

This paper is concerned with the saddle-point problems arising from edge element discretizations of Maxwell's equations in a general three dimensional nonconvex polyhedral domain. A new augmented technique is first introduced to transform the problems into equivalent augmented saddle-point systems so that they can be solved by some existing preconditioned iterative methods. Then some substructuring preconditioners are proposed, with very simple coarse solvers, for the augmented saddle-point systems. With the preconditioners, the condition numbers of the preconditioned systems are nearly optimal; namely, they grow only as the logarithm of the ratio between the subdomain diameter and the finite element mesh size.

     

Construction algorithms for polynomial lattice rules for multivariate integration

We introduce a new construction algorithm for digital nets for integration in certain weighted tensor product Hilbert spaces. The first weighted Hilbert space we consider is based on Walsh functions. Dick and Pillichshammer calculated the worst-case error for integration using digital nets for this space. Here we extend this result to a special construction method for digital nets based on polynomials over finite fields. This result allows us to find polynomials which yield a small worst-case error by computer search. We prove an upper bound on the worst-case error for digital nets obtained by such a search algorithm which shows that the convergence rate is best possible and that strong tractability holds under some condition on the weights.

We extend the results for the weighted Hilbert space based on Walsh functions to weighted Sobolev spaces. In this case we use randomly digitally shifted digital nets. The construction principle is the same as before, only the worst-case error is slightly different. Again digital nets obtained from our search algorithm yield a worst-case error achieving the optimal rate of convergence and as before strong tractability holds under some condition on the weights. These results show that such a construction of digital nets yields the until now best known results of this kind and that our construction methods are comparable to the construction methods known for lattice rules.

We conclude the article with numerical results comparing the expected worst-case error for randomly digitally shifted digital nets with those for randomly shifted lattice rules.