Subliminal exposure to national flags affects political thought and behavior

Political thought and behavior play an important role in our lives, from ethnic tensions in Europe, to the war in Iraq and the Middle Eastern conflict, to parliamentary and presidential elections. However, little is known about how the individual's political attitudes and decisions are shaped by subtle national cues that are so prevalent in our environment. We report a series of experiments that show that subliminal exposure to one's national flag influences political attitudes, intentions, and decisions, both in laboratory settings and in "real-life" behavior. Furthermore, this manipulation consistently narrowed the gap between those who score high vs. low on a scale of identification with Israeli nationalism. The first two experiments examined participants' stance toward the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the Jewish settlers in the West Bank. Experiment 3 examined voting intentions and actual voting in Israel's recently held general elections. The results portray a consistent picture: subtle reminders of one's nationality significantly influence political thought and overt political behavior.     

Longitudinal outcomes of a consumer-directed program supporting adults with developmental disabilities and their families

Longitudinal impacts of a consumer-directed support program that provides families with an individualized budget were studied at three points in time over a 9-year period: Time 1 (1991), Time 2 (1995), and Time 3 (2000). At Time 3, families in the program were also compared with families on the waiting list. Over time, families in the program experienced decreased unmet service needs, higher service satisfaction, increased community participation of individuals with disabilities, and decreased caregiver burden. At Time 3 families in the program had fewer unmet needs and higher service satisfaction than did families on the waiting list; there were no differences in community participation and caregiver burden.     

Perfusion cell seeding and cultivation induce the assembly of thick and functional hepatocellular tissue-like construct

Developing advanced technologies for encouraging the ex vivo assembly of functional hepatic tissue for implantation into the human body or for in vitro drug testing is one of the challenging tasks facing tissue engineers. In the present study, we utilized a perfusion bioreactor system equipped with a novel flow-distributing mesh for online cell seeding into macroporous alginate scaffolds and cultivation of multiple constructs of the C3A human hepatocyte cell line. Optimization of the medium flow rate (100 mL/min) and perfusion duration (12 h) yielded cell constructs with high cell seeding efficiency (98% of the input cells) and cell distribution throughout the entire scaffold. Further, we show that interstitial medium flow enabled uniform cell delivery into 35 constructs lined across the bioreactor cross section. Perfusion-cultivated cell constructs revealed much greater rates of cell proliferation, albumin-specific secretion, and gene expression of the phase I enzyme, CYP3A4, and phase II enzyme, UGT2B7, than did static-cultivated constructs. Most impressive was the 50-fold increase in CYP3A4 expression of the perfused cell constructs as compared to the level in static-cultivated cell constructs. We thus believe that the hepatic tissue constructs developed herein may be used in drug discovery programs for elucidating drug metabolism and toxicity profiles and for treating failing livers.     

An analytical formulation of the law of intersegmental coordination during human locomotion

The law of intersegmental coordination is a kinematic law that describes the coordination patterns among the elevation angles of the lower limb segments during locomotion (Borghese et al. in J Physiol 494:863–879, 1996). This coordination pattern reduces the number of degrees of freedom of the lower limb to two, i.e. the elevation angles covary along a plane in angular space. The properties of the plane that constrains the time course of the elevation angles have been extensively studied, and its orientation was found to be correlated with gait velocity and energy expenditure (Bianchi et al. in J Neurophysiol 79:2155–2170, 1998). Here, we present a mathematical model that represents the rotations of the elevation angles in terms of simple oscillators with appropriate phase shifts between them. The model explains what requirements the time courses of the elevation angles must fulfill in order for the angular covariation relationship to be planar. Moreover, an analytical formulation is proposed for both the orientation of the plane and for the eccentricity of the nearly elliptical shape that is generated within this plane, in terms of the amplitudes and relative phases of the first harmonics of the segments elevation angles. The model presented here sheds some new light on the possible interactions among the Central Pattern Generators possibly underlying the control of biped locomotion. The model precisely specifies how any two segments in the limb interact, and how a change in gait velocity affects the orientation of the intersegmental coordination plane mainly through a change in phase shifts between the segments. Implications of this study with respect to neural control of locomotion and other motor activities are discussed. Electronic supplementary material  The online version of this article (doi:) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

Cell signaling pathways and iron chelation in the neurorestorative activity of green tea polyphenols: special reference to epigallocatechin gallate (EGCG)

Although much progress has been made in understanding the pathogenesis of Alzheimer's disease (AD), the current therapeutic approaches are merely symptomatic, intended for the treatment of cognitive symptoms, such as disturbances in memory and perception. Novel promising strategies suggest the use of anti-inflammatory drugs, antioxidants including natural occurring plant flavonoids, iron-complexing molecules, neurotrophic factor delivery, inhibitors of the amyloid-beta protein precursor processing secretases, gamma and beta, that generate amyloid-beta peptides and the interference with lipid and cholesterol metabolism. Human epidemiological and new animal data suggest that tea drinking may decrease the incidence of dementia, AD and Parkinson's disease. In particular, its main catechin polyphenol constituent (-)-epigallocatechin-3-gallate (EGCG) has been shown to exert neuroprotective/neurorescue activities in a wide array of cellular and animal models of neurological disorders. This review provides a detailed overview on the multimodal activities of green tea polyphenols with emphasis on their iron chelating, neurorescue/neuroregenerative and mitochondrial stabilization action.