Background: Hypocalcemia is a documented electrolyte disturbance in people and animals with sepsis, but its mechanism is poorly understood.Objective: To investigate mechanisms of hypocalcemia in dogs with experimentally induced endotoxemia. Animals: Six healthy mixed breed dogs were included in this nonrandomized, placebo-controlled, crossover study. Methods: Dogs initially were injected with placebo (0.9% NaCl; 1 mL, IV) and then lipopolysaccharide (LPS; 2 lg/kg, IV) after a 5-day washout period. Blood and urine samples were collected for measurement of serum total calcium (tCa), ionized calcium (iCa), total magnesium (tMg), ionized magnesium (iMg), parathyroid hormone (PTH), 25-hydroxyvitamin D (vitamin D), venous blood gases, and fractional excretion (FE) of calcium.Results: After LPS administration, body temperature increased and blood pressure decreased. Both iCa and tCa decreased (P < .01), but iMg was not significantly different between control and LPS treatments. PTH concentrations increased (P < .01) and vitamin D concentrations decreased (P < .01). Venous pH, bicarbonate, base excess, and blood glucose also decreased (P < .01). Urine tCa concentration was below the limit of detection for all dogs after LPS administration.Conclusions: Hypocalcemia occurs during endotoxemia in dogs and is associated with hypovitaminosis D. Hypomagnesemia, hypoparathyroidism, alkalosis, and increased calciuresis are not associated with hypocalcemia in endotoxemic dogs.

We present a low-power gas sensor design based on a capacitive micromachined ultrasonic transducer (CMUT), for use on self-powered wearable platforms. Earlier a CMUT-based sensor, with 70-mW power consumption operating at 50 MHz, achieved ppt-level detection limit for chemical warfare agents. In this work we present a sensor operating at 4.33 MHz and consuming 0.77 mW for environmental monitoring. The sensor comprises a polymer-functionalized CMUT resonator in the feedback loop of a Colpitts oscillator. We fabricated the CMUT resonators using a novel process based on anodic bonding. The cavities and bottom electrodes are formed on a borosilicate glass wafer. The device layer of an SOI wafer bonded on glass forms the vibrating plate on top of vacuum-sealed cavities. This fabrication approach reduces process complexity and helps minimize parasitic components. CMUTs with center frequencies in the 3-50 MHz range with Q-factors as high as ~400 have successfully been fabricated. We used a 4.52-MHz device (Q=180) coated with a thin layer of polyisobutylene (PIB) for sensor demonstration.

Desktop computing remains indispensable in scientific exploration, largely because it provides people with devices for human interaction and environments for interactive job execution. However, with today's rapidly growing data volume and task complexity, it is increasingly hard for individual workstations to meet the demands of interactive scientific data processing. The increasing cost of such interactive processing is hindering the productivity of end-to-end scientific computing workflows. While existing distributed computing systems allow people to aggregate desktop workstation resources for parallel computing, the burden of explicit parallel programming and parallel job execution often prohibits scientists to take advantage of such platforms. In this paper, we discuss the need for transparent desktop parallel computing in scientific data processing. As an initial step toward this goal, we present our ongoing work on the automatic parallelization of the scripting language R, a popular tool for statistical computing. Our preliminary results suggest that a reasonable speedup can be achieved on real-world sequential R programs without requiring any code modification. 1 1 This research was funded by an NSF CAREER Award, CNS-0546301 and Xiaosong Ma's joint appointment with Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL). It was also partly supported by the DOE Scientific Data Management Center (http://sdmcenter.lbl.gov). ORNL is managed by the University of Tennessee-Battelle, L.L.C. for the Department of Energy under contract DOE-AC05-00OR22725.

Thin films of VOx (1.3 ≤ x ≤ 2) were deposited by reactive pulsed-dc magnetron sputtering of a vanadium metal target while RF-biasing the substrate. Rutherford back scattering, glancing angle x-ray, and cross-sectional transmission electron microscopy measurements revealed the formation of nanocolumns with nanotwins within VOx samples. The resistivity of nanotwinned VOx films ranged from 4 mΩ·cm to 0.6 Ω·cm and corresponding temperature coefficient of resistance between −0.1% and −2.6% per K, respectively. The 1/f electrical noise was analyzed in these VOx samples using the Hooge-Vandamme relation. These VOx films are comparable or surpass commercial VOx films deposited by ion beam sputtering.

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