This article represents the proceedings of a symposium presented at the 12th Congress of the International Society for Biomedical Research on Alcoholism held in Heidelberg/Mannheim, Germany, on September 30, 2004. The organizers and cochairs were Bankole A. Johnson, DSc, MD, PhD, and Karl Mann, MD. The presentations included the following: (1) A Perspective from Academia, by Bankole A. Johnson, DS

We introduce and analyze a new statistical ensemble of lowdensity parity-check convolutional (LDC) codes. The result of the analysis are bounds, such as a lower bound for the free distance and upper bounds for the burst error probability of the LDC codes.

We study the electromagnetic form factor of the pion and kaons at low-energies with the use of Chiral Perturbation Theory. The analysis is performed within the three flavour framework and at next-to-next-to-leading order. We explain carefully all the relevant consistency checks on the expressions, present full analytical results for the pion form factor and describe all the assumptions in the anal

Mn(III) protoporphyrin IX-6(7)-gly-gly-his methyl ester (MnGGH) has been prepared by condensation of glycyl-glycyl-L-histidine methyl ester with the propionic side chains of Mn(III) protoporphyrin IX. It was characterised by mass spectrometry and UV/VIS spectroscopy. Stopped-flow spectrophotometry was used to study the reaction of the Mn microperoxidase with hydrogen peroxide. The formation of act

The mechanism of atomic and molecular ionization in intense, ultra-short laser fields is a subject which continues to receive considerable attention. An inherent difficulty with techniques involving the tight focus of a laser beam is the continuous distribution of intensities contained within the focus, which can vary over several orders of magnitude. The present study adopts time of flight mass s

The contamination of pasteurized milk by Bacillus cereus during the ®lling process was studied in two dairy plants. Samples of pasteurized milk were taken at four different sites along the production line. The samples were stored at 7 °C for 7 d, or at 10 °C for 5 d, before plate counting and random selection of B. cereus isolates. Isolates of B. cereus were typed by the polymerase chain reaction

Telomeres are essential structures for maintaining chromosomal stability and their length has been reported to correlate with cancer risk and clinical outcome. Single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) in genes encoding telomere-associated proteins could affect telomere length and chromosomal stability by influencing gene expression or protein configuration in the telomeres. Here, we report the resul

Recently, unusual forms of leukemias have developed as complications following retroviral transfer of potentially therapeutic genes into hematopoietic cells. A crucial component in the pathogenesis of these complications was the upregulation of a cellular proto-oncogene by random insertion of the retroviral gene transfer vector. These findings have great implications for the genetic manipulation o

We present two methods for finding a lowest common ancestor (LCA) for each pair of vertices of a directed acyclic graph (dag) on n vertices and m edges. The first method is surprisingly natural and solves the all-pairs LCA problem for the input dag on n vertices and m edges in time O(nm). As a corollary, we obtain an O(n(2))-time algorithm for finding genealogical distances considerably improving

Although the benefits of topical sensitizer administration have been confirmed for photodynamic therapy (PDT) ALA-induced, protoporphyrin IX is the only sensitizer clinically used with this administration route. Unfortunately, ALA-PDT results in poor treatment response for thicker lesions. Here, selectivity and depth distribution of the highly potent sensitizer meso-tetra(hydroxyphenyl)chlorin (mT

The lower excited states of 2-benzoylthiophene have been studied using ab initio quantum chemical methods based on multiconfigurational wave functions. Six singlet and six triplet excited states have been characterized. The geometry has been optimized for the two lowest triplet states, which are responsible for the photoreactivity of the chromophore in the photosensitizing drug tiaprofenic acid. T

The aim of this study was to explore the previous personalities of patients, their behavior during the course of the disease, and the relationship between the previous personality and vocally disruptive behavior of severely demented patients. Twenty-one severely demented patients identified as vocally disruptive and 19 severely demented control subjects who were matched for gender and ward were st

Biological molecular motors that are constrained so that function is effectively limited to predefined nanosized tracks may be used as molecular shuttles in nanotechnological applications. For these applications and in high-throughput functional assays (e. g., drug screening), it is important that the motors propel their cytoskeletal filaments unidirectionally along the tracks with a minimal numbe

Recent Hubble Space Telescope observations of a large sample of globular clusters reveal that every cluster contains between 40 and 400 blue stragglers.The population does not correlate with either stellar collision rate (as would be expected if all blue stragglers were formed via collisions) or total mass (as would be expected if all blue stragglers were formed via the unhindered evolution of a s