Asialoglycoprotein receptor and hepatic blood flow using technetium-99m-DTPA-galactosyl human serum albumin

The decades just before and after the founding of the American Public Health Association in 1872 saw an efflorescence of political cartooning and caricature in national-circulation weeklies. Part of the political and social critique that cartoonists and their editors provided the public focused on needs or opportunities for preventing illness and accidents. This paper presents a small selection of editorial cartoons that agitated in support of public health activities over 4 decades. The goals are to illustrate several concerns that rose to national prominence in that era, to examine the kinds of imagery that newspapers and magazine editors offered their readers, and to observe how frequently the public was encouraged to see politicians and commercial interests as responsible for preventable health problems. This discussion focuses exclusively on propagandistic images, leaving aside the reportorial depictions of events in the news and the neutral illustrations of methods and machines in scientific and technical publications.     

A system for measuring magnetic core noise as a function of themagnetization level

The problem of magnetic core noise is considered in terms of non-repeatability of the hysteresis loop trace for any repetition of the magnetization process. The examination condition is that the effect of eddy currents is reduced to as low a level as possible. Based on such premises, this paper presents a system which periodically extracts the fluctuation voltage, induced at an arbitrary but specified point of the impressed magnetic field, as an instantaneous value. The minimum extraction interval is mainly determined by the integration time of the digital voltmeter used to measure the voltage and by the time required for transferring the extracted data to a personal computer. Therefore, the upper limit of the repetition frequency for the magnetization is restricted to less than 1 Hz. The serially extracted time data is dealt with in a statistical manner and is arranged in order as a magnitude distribution. Two kinds of cores are tested, one is a Fe-Ni-based amorphous core and the other a supermalloy. The results reveal that each core has distinctive noise features     

Identification of tethering domains for protein kinase A type Ialpha regulatory subunits on sperm fibrous sheath protein FSC1

The fibrous sheath is a unique cytoskeletal structure in the sperm flagellum believed to modulate sperm motility. FSC1 is the major structural protein of the fibrous sheath. The yeast two-hybrid system was used to identify other proteins that contribute to the structure of the fibrous sheath or participate in sperm motility. When FSC1 was used as the bait to screen a mouse testis cDNA library, two clones were isolated encoding the type Ialpha regulatory subunit (RIalpha) of cAMP-dependent protein kinase. Deletion analysis using the yeast two-hybrid system and in vitro binding assays with glutathione S-transferase-FSC1 fusion proteins identified two RIalpha tethering domains on FSC1. A domain located at residues 219-232 (termed domain A) corresponds to the reported tethering domain for a type II regulatory subunit (RII) of cAMP-dependent protein kinase, indicating that this binding domain has dual specificity to RI and RII. Another RIalpha tethering site (termed domain B) at residues 335-344 shows specific binding of RIalpha and had no significant sequence homology with known RII tethering domains. However, helical wheel projection analysis indicates that domain B is likely to form an amphipathic helix, the secondary structure of RII tethering domains of protein kinase A anchoring proteins. This was supported by the finding that site-directed mutagenesis to disrupt the amphipathic helix eliminated RIalpha binding. This is apparently the first report of an RIalpha-specific protein kinase A anchoring protein tethering domain.     

Multilevel Decision Method for Band-Limited Digital FM with Limiter-Discriminator Detection

A new decision method for band-limited digital FM that employs discriminator detection is presented. This new method adopts a multilevel decision scheme to soften the intersymbol interference effects caused by severe band limitation. It is shown that applying this method significantly improves bit error rate (BER) performance of digital FM using discriminator detection. Theoretical BER evaluation proves the superiority of this method, and establishes the optimum values for fundamental transmitter parameters. Experimental results are provided to support the superiority of this method.     

Site-directed mutational analysis for the ATP binding of DnaA protein. Functions of two conserved amino acids (Lys-178 and Asp-235) located in the ATP-binding domain of DnaA protein in vitro and in vivo

DnaA protein, the initiator of chromosomal DNA replication in Escherichia coli, is activated by binding to ATP in vitro. We introduced site-directed mutations into two amino acids of the protein conserved among various ATP-binding proteins and examined functions of the mutated DnaA proteins, in vitro and in vivo. Both mutated DnaA proteins (Lys-178 --> Ile or Asp-235 --> Asn) lost the affinity for both ATP and ADP but did maintain binding activity for oriC. Specific activities in an oriC DNA replication system in vitro were less than one-tenth those of the wild-type protein. Assay of the generation of oriC sites sensitive to P1 nuclease, using the mutated DnaA proteins, revealed a defect in induction of the duplex opening at oriC. On the other hand, expression of each mutated DnaA protein in the temperature-sensitive dnaA46 mutant did not complement the temperature sensitivity. We suggest that Lys-178 and Asp-235 of DnaA protein are essential for the activity needed to initiate oriC DNA replication in vitro and in vivo and that ATP binding to DnaA protein is required for DNA replication-related functions.     

Design of a pitch synchronous innovation CELP coder for mobilecommunications

This paper describes the design of a speech coder called pitch synchronous innovation CELP (PSI-CELP) for low hit-rate mobile communications. PSI-CELP is based on CELP, but has more adaptive excitation structures. In voiced frames, instead of conventional random excitation vectors, PSI-CELP converts even the random excitation vectors to have pitch periodicity by repeating stored random vectors as well as by using an adaptive codebook, in silent, unvoiced, and transient frames, the coder stops using the adaptive codebook and switches to fixed random codebooks. The PSI-CELP coder also implements novel structures and techniques: an FIR-type perceptual weighting filter using unquantized LPC parameters, a random codebook with a conjugate structure trained to be robust against channel errors, codebook search with delayed decision, a gain quantization with sloped amplitude, and a moving average prediction coding of LSP parameters, Our speech coder is implemented by DSP chips. Its coded speech quality at 3.6 kb/s with 2.0 kb/s redundancy is comparable to that of the Japanese full-rate VSELP coder at 6.7 kb/s with 4.5 kb/s redundancy. The basic structure of this PSI-CELP coder has been chosen as the Japanese half-rate speech codec for digital cellular telecommunications