The cranial endoskeleton of Tiktaalik roseae

Among the morphological changes that occurred during the 'fish-to-tetrapod' transition was a marked reorganization of the cranial endoskeleton. Details of this transition, including the sequence of character acquisition, have not been evident from the fossil record. Here we describe the braincase, palatoquadrate and branchial skeleton of Tiktaalik roseae, the Late Devonian sarcopterygian fish most closely related to tetrapods. Although retaining a primitive configuration in many respects, the cranial endoskeleton of T. roseae shares derived features with tetrapods such as a large basal articulation and a flat, horizontally oriented entopterygoid. Other features in T. roseae, like the short, straight hyomandibula, show morphology intermediate between the condition observed in more primitive fish and that observed in tetrapods. The combination of characters in T. roseae helps to resolve the relative timing of modifications in the cranial endoskeleton. The sequence of modifications suggests changes in head mobility and intracranial kinesis that have ramifications for the origin of vertebrate terrestriality.     

A security patch for a three-party key exchange protocol

The CLC protocol (proposed by Tzung-Her Chen, Wei-Bin Lee and Hsing-Bai Chen, CLC, for short) is a new three-party password-authenticated key exchange (3PAKE) protocol. This CLC protocol provides a superior round efficiency (only three rounds), and its resources required for computation are relatively few. However, we find that the leakage of values A _V and B _V in the CLC protocol will make a man-in-the-middle attack feasible in practice, where A _V and B _V are the authentication information chosen by the server for the participants A and B. In this paper, we describe our attack on the CLC protocol and further present a modified 3PAKE protocol, which is essentially an improved CLC protocol. Our protocol can resist attacks available, including man-in-the-middle attack we mount on the initial CLC protocol. Meanwhile, we allow that the participants choose their own passwords by themselves, thus avoiding the danger that the server is controlled in the initialization phase. Also, the computational cost of our protocol is lower than that of the CLC protocol.     

Nanovid microscopy.

By combining small colloidal gold probes with video-enhanced quantitative microscopy, the intracellular dynamics of specific proteins in living cells can now be studied.     

Effect of nicotine on the transmembrane potential and contractility of isolated rat atria

Zusammenfassung Die Wirkungen von Nikotin auf die Kontraktilität und die Membranpotentiale des Rattenatriums wurden untersucht. Nikotin (5 × 10^–4 M) erhöhte gleichzeitig die entwickelte Spannung sowie die Dauer und Fläche des Aktionspotentials. Ein möglicher Zusammenhang dieser Änderungen mit der erhöhten Kontraktilität wird diskutiert.

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Deceased 22 July 1966.     

Multifractality in human heartbeat dynamics.

There is evidence that physiological signals under healthy conditions may have a fractal temporal structure. Here we investigate the possibility that time series generated by certain physiological control systems may be members of a special class of complex processes, termed multifractal, which require a large number of exponents to characterize their scaling properties. We report on evidence for multifractality in a biological dynamical system, the healthy human heartbeat, and show that the multifractal character and nonlinear properties of the healthy heart rate are encoded in the Fourier phases. We uncover a loss of multifractality for a life-threatening condition, congestive heart failure.