A double-acceleration stage linear time of flight mass spectrometer (TOF MS) with Nd/YAG laser ablation cluster source was designed and constructed for cluster production, study and deposition. Cumulenic polycarbons SC n S ( n = 2-27) were...
The main driving force behind the development of computers was the attempt to solve problems that would otherwise require a large amount of time to be solved. Despite the technological development that has made computers ubiquitous in daily lives,...
Hematopoietic stem cells (HSCs) are the cells that can give rise to all different lineages of differentiated/mature blood cells. HSCs are capable of self-renewal and maintaining the homeostasis of differentiated cells for specific functions. The...
Gene set testing has become a critical tool for interpreting the results of high-throughput genomic experiments. Despite the development of robust statistical methods and extensive gene set collections, however, the results from gene set testing...
Genome-wide association studies (GWAS) have identified more than 8,900 genetic variants, mainly single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs), associated with hundreds of human traits and diseases, which define risk-associated loci (Hindorff et al., 2012 ...
Wireless communication systems. Computer networks. Routers (Computer networks).
A mesh network is a network of wireless routers that employ multi-hop routing and can be used to provide network access for mobile clients. Mobile mesh networks can be deployed rapidly to provide an alternate communication infrastructure for...
Earlier work has suggested that various neurological or neuropsychiatric disorders may result in characteristic spatial patterns in brain activation, potentially allowing their detection from maps of brain activity under different conditions....
Humans have a seemingly unique capacity to reflect upon information about the self to form evaluative attitudes that influence their quality of life and predict mental health outcomes. While psychologists have devoted decades of research to the...
All cells must organize their cytoplasm in order to carry out functions properly and survive in different environments, and the requirement for organization is increased in large, multinucleate cells. It has long been known that membrane-bound...
Arabidopsis thaliana -- Physiology. Zinc -- Physiological transport. Iron -- Physiological transport. Homeostasis. Trace elements in plant nutrition.
Iron and zinc are essential metal micronutrients that most humans acquire from plant-based diets. Unfortunately, plants are not a good source of these micronutrients, so billions of people worldwide suffer from deficiencies of these two elements....
Behavior during interracial contact is sometimes positive but often negative. Previous work has examined individual differences, such as racial attitudes and motivations to respond without prejudice, as predictors of behavior during interracial...
Brain tumors account for ~2% of all cancers, with gliomas accounting for ~70% of all brain tumors. Evidence suggests that extent of resection provides both a quality of life and survival benefit to patients. Recent work has shown the utility of...
Our daily lives are pervaded by sounds, predominantly speech, music, and environmental sounds. We readily recognize and categorize such sounds. Our understanding of how the brain so effortlessly recognizes and categorizes sounds is still...
Although ambivalence is not an everyday emotional state, it is quite prevelent during critical behavioral and life changes (e.g., smoking cessation). The goal of the present thesis was to understand the relationships between acute (Aim 1) and...
Radio relics are extended regions of synchrotron radio emission that have been found in the outskirts of a few dozen galaxy clusters. Relics are often associated with clusters undergoing merger activity. They are not associated optically with a...
As methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) hospitalizations keep increasing, the understanding of the characteristics that make one isolate more successful over another is paramount. Strain variations among Staphylococcus aureus observed...
The coordination and coupling of the several steps in mRNA biogenesis helps to ensure proper regulation of gene expression. The DEAD-box helicase Dbp5/Rat8 is an essential mRNA export factor that has also been implicated in other steps of mRNA...
We present aligned hierarchies, a novel solution to the dimension reduction problem, representing high-dimensional and noisy sequential data as a low-dimensional object that encodes relevant information. In this thesis, we motivate our presentation...
Robustness to genetic perturbations is a fundamental property of all living things. The genetic code is degenerate, RNA secondary structure is robust to sequence changes, and protein structure is robust to amino acid substitutions. Complex systems...
Anabolic-androgenic steroids (AAS) are synthetic derivatives of the gonadal hormone, testosterone. Despite their many untoward side effects, AAS are wildly abused for their ergogenic properties. AAS have numerous effects on many organ systems,...
Perceptual-motor learning -- Physiological aspects. ; Language acquisition -- Physiological aspects. ; Motor ability -- Physiological aspects. ; Knots and splices.
The studies presented in this dissertation explore several points of intersection between action perception and production within the human brain. One's ability to use perceptual information about another individual's actions to guide and inform...
Stigma (Social psychology). Aging -- Psychological aspects. Cognition -- Age factors. Older people -- Attitudes.
Extensive research on aging has demonstrated that normal aging debilitates executive function, a system that is critical for regulating stereotypes. However, there is a paucity of research on whether age-related declines to executive function...
The rat limbic system contains head direction (HD) cells that fire according to heading in the horizontal plane. These HD cells are thought to provide animals with an internal compass to guide navigation. Previous work has found that HD cell tuning...
Protein secretion is executed by the secretory pathway, which involves the delivery of membrane and soluble secretory proteins in vesicle intermediates that capture newly-synthesized proteins assembled in the endoplasmic reticulum (ER) and then...
One of the most distinctive aspects of humans as a species is our propensity to form complex social networks made up of intense, non-reproductive bonds with non-kin. Navigating these networks presents a considerable cognitive challenge that is...
The identification of molecular alterations present in cancer is critical to better understand carcinogenesis as well as the clinical trajectories of patients with malignant tumors. Early detection and application of appropriate treatment...
We start by introducing avoidance coupling of Markov chains, with an overview of existing results. We then introduce and motivate a new notion, uniform coupling. We show that the only Markovian avoidance coupling on a cycle is of this type, and...
This thesis is divided into 2 parts. In the first part of the thesis, we describe a software based approach to speeding up the Magnetic Resonance Imaging modality. In the second part of the thesis, we describe Significance Tree Quantization, which...