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Objective: Cinnamaldehyde was encapsulated in the liposome. Methods: Cinnamaldehyde was selected as the research object and the cinnamaldehyde liposomes were prepared by ethanol injection method. The effects of phospholipid concentration, ratio of phospholipid to cholesterol, ratio of phospholipid to cinnamaldehyde and injection velocity on the encapsulation efficiency, particle size and polydispersity index （PDI） of cinnamaldehyde liposomes were investigated, and the process was optimized by response surface method with the encapsulation efficiency as the index. Results: The optimum preparation conditions of cinnamaldehyde liposomes were as follows: the phospholipid concentration was 2.69 mg/mL, the ratio of phospholipid to cinnamaldehyde was 6.73, and the ratio of phospholipid to cholesterol was 5.79. Under the control of these conditions, the encapsulation efficiency of cinnamaldehyde liposome was 82.37%, and the particle size and zeta potential were 113.89 nm, and -29.07 mV, respectively. After 4 weeks of storage at 4 ℃, it still has a high encapsulation efficiency and good stability. Conclusion: Cinnamaldehyde liposomes with small particle size, high encapsulation efficiency and stable properties could be prepared by ethanol injection method.

Background: Fetal microchimerism occurs in the mother after a pregnancy. To investigate the role of fetal microchimerism cells (FMCs) in rheumatoid arthritis, we analyzed the population of fetal cells in pregnant experimental arthritis mice. Methods: We used EGFP+ fetuses, which were mated with either healthy female mice or CIA mice, and male C57BL/6J‐Tg (Pgk1‐EGFP)03Narl mice, to detect the population of FMCs in maternal circulation. The disease progression was determined by measuring the clinical score and histological stains during pregnancy. The fetal cells have been analyzed if expressing EGFP, CD45, and Scal by flow cytometry. We also detected the expression of CD14+ IL‐10+ cells in vivo and in vitro. Results: Our data showed that the pregnancy ameliorated the arthritis progression of CIA mice. The IHC stains showed the CD45 −Sca‐1+ EGFP+ FMCs were expressed in the bone marrow and peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBMC) at 14 gestation days. However, Treg and Tc cell populations showed no significant change in the bone marrow. The data showed the H2Kb + fetal cells induced CD14+ IL10+ cell populations increased in the bone marrow in vitro and in vivo. Conclusion: Our investigations demonstrated that the FMCs protected the CIA mice from cartilage damage and triggered an immunosuppressive response in them by increasing the number of CD14+ IL10+ cells. In conclusion, the FMCs could potentially exhibit protective properties within the context of inflammatory arthritis that arises during pregnancy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Describes the design and implementation of a system for the selective dissemination of information (SDI) from news articles via the World Wide Web, in Chinese and English, that focuses on multi-language filtering tools and follows a client-server model. System architecture and user-interest modeling are discussed. (LRW)

To link to full-text access for this article, visit this link: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jss.2004.10.013 Byline: Ying-Jie Jiang, Da-Wei Chang, Ruei-Chuan Chang Keywords: High availability; Fault tolerant; Operating system; Network services Abstract: High availability is becoming an essential part of network services because even a little downtime may lead to a great loss of money. According to previous research, network failure is one of the major causes of system unavailability. In this paper, we propose a framework called HANet for building highly available network services. The main goal of HANet is to allow a server to continue providing services when all its network interfaces to the outside world (i.e., public interfaces) have failed. This is achieved by two techniques. First, a network interface can be backed up not only by other public network interfaces, but also by other inter-server I/O communication interfaces (i.e., private interfaces) such as Ethernet, USB, RS232, etc. Therefore, IP packets can still be transmitted and received via these I/O links, even when all of the public network interfaces have failed. Second, HANet allows a server to take over the packet transmission job of another network-failed server. The benefit of HANet is that a network-failed server will not lose any requests which are being processed. And, it is efficient since no synchronization overhead or replaying process is required. Moreover, it is totally transparent to server applications and clients. To demonstrate the feasibility of HANet, we implemented it in the Linux kernel. According to the performance results, using a private Fast Ethernet interface for data communication leads to only 1% overhead in user-perceived latency when the public Fast Ethernet interface of the server has failed. This indicates that HANet is efficient, and hence is feasible for commercial network services. Author Affiliation: Department of Computer and Information Science, National Chiao-Tung University, 1001 Ta Hsueh Road, HsinChu, Taiwan 30050, ROC Article History: Received 16 December 2003; Revised 11 October 2004; Accepted 21 October 2004

Background: Effect of neurofeedback training (NFT) on enhancement of cognitive function or amelioration of clinical symptoms is inconclusive. The trainability of brain rhythm using a neurofeedback system is uncertainty because various experimental designs are used in previous studies. The current study aimed to develop a portable wireless NFT system for alpha rhythm and to validate effect of the NFT system on memory with a sham-controlled group.Methods: The proposed system contained an EEG signal analysis device and a smartphone with wireless Bluetooth low-energy technology. Instantaneous 1-s EEG power and contiguous 5-min EEG power throughout the training were developed as feedback information. The training performance and its progression were kept to boost usability of our device. Participants were blinded and randomly assigned into either the control group receiving random 4-Hz power or Alpha group receiving 8-12-Hz power. Working memory and episodic memory were assessed by the backward digital span task and word-pair task, respectively.Results: The portable neurofeedback system had advantages of a tiny size and long-term recording and demonstrated trainability of alpha rhythm in terms of significant increase of power and duration of 8-12 Hz. Moreover, accuracies of the backward digital span task and word-pair task showed significant enhancement in the Alpha group after training compared to the control group.Conclusions: Our tiny portable device demonstrated success trainability of alpha rhythm and enhanced two kinds of memories. The present study suggest that the portable neurofeedback system provides an alternative intervention for memory enhancement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many studies have shown that energy consumption of on-chip memory is a critical issue for multicore embedded systems. In order to reduce energy consumption, scratchpad memory (SPM), a software controlled on-chip memory, has been increasingly used. In a typical multicore embedded system that uses SPM in the on-chip memory, each core has local SPM and can access data in both local SPM and SPMs of other cores (i.e., remote SPM). Since the latency and energy of accessing remote SPMs is higher than accessing local SPM, how data are allocated in local and remote SPMs influences the performance and energy consumption of the system. This paper proposes a requirement-aware online hybrid on-chip memory management (ROHOM) method. This method contains an SPM supervisor that determines the SPM allocation of each task according to the dynamic access behavior and SPM requirements of the task. In addition, two policies: 1) free remote SPM space first and 2) get local SPM space first, are proposed in ROHOM to reduce the access frequency of remote SPMs. The experimental results show ROHOM can reduce energy delay product up to 69% (42% on average) in an 8-core system and up to 69% (50% on average) in a 16-core system when compared to a contention aware SPM allocation method. The hardware area overhead is insignificant (about 1.8%). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]