Reductions in hippocampal neurite complexity and synaptic plasticity are believed to contribute to the progressive impairment in episodic memory and the mild cognitive decline that occur particularly in the early stages of Alzheimer's disease (AD). Despite the functional and therapeutic importance for patients with AD, intervention to rescue or normalize dendritic elaboration and synaptic plasticity is scarcely provided. Here we show that overexpression of neuritin, an activity-dependent protein, promoted neurite outgrowth and maturation of synapses in parallel with enhanced basal synaptic transmission in cultured hippocampal neurons. Importantly, exogenous application of recombinant neuritin fully restored dendritic complexity as well as spine density in hippocampal neurons prepared from Tg2576 mice, whereas it did not affect neurite branching of neurons from their wild-type littermates. We also showed that soluble recombinant neuritin, when chronically infused into the brains of Tg2576 mice, normalized synaptic plasticity in acute hippocampal slices, leading to intact long-term potentiation. By revealing the protective actions of soluble neuritin against AD-related neural defects, we provide a potential therapeutic approach for patients with AD.

The objective of this work is to search the optimal shapes and locations of ribs in order to increase the stiffness of structures using the topology optimization technique. In this approach, an initial rib structure consisting of many discrete shell elements is added to the existing structure and the optimization procedure is applied to determine the density of each element for the minimal mean compliance of the whole system. The remaining shell elements determined to have higher densities by an optimization procedure will remain attached to the structure and become the rib structure. This is different from the existing approach which tries to derive the rib design from the optimized thickness distribution of the structure. A penalty term is also introduced in the objective function in addition to the mean compliance to prohibit the intermediate densities. The mean compliance is computed by the finite element method in which each element has a variable density. Young's modulus of each element is derived by assuming a quadratic relation between the density and Young's modulus. The optimization is performed by the feasible direction method using the densities of elements as the design variables. The total material usage is used as a constraint in the optimization to provide lightweight structures.

This paper discusses the use of nanomaterials for the improved performance of time-of-flight particle detectors based on secondary electron emission (SEE). The purpose of the research presented in this paper is to find a nanomaterial that has a higher SEE than gold. In this article, we present a measurement of the SEE properties from 1D (one-dimensional) nanostructures of ZnO and ZnO/GaN (ZnO with GaN coating) composed of a mostly regular pattern of nanotubes grown on a thin Si3N4 substrate. The study was performed with 4.77 meV/u Au beam. We observed an average increase of 2.5 in the SEE properties from the 1D ZnO nanotubes compared to gold.

A search is presented for decays of and Higgs bosons to a meson and a photon, with the subsequent decay of the to . The analysis uses data from proton-proton collisions with an integrated luminosity of 35.9 at collected with the CMS detector at the LHC. The observed limit on the decay branching fraction, assuming that the meson is produced unpolarized, is at 95% confidence level, which corresponds to a rate higher than expected in the standard model by a factor of 15. For extreme-polarization scenarios, the observed limit changes from to with respect to the unpolarized scenario. The observed upper limit on the branching fraction for where the meson is assumed to be transversely polarized is , a factor of 260 larger than the standard model prediction. The results for the Higgs boson are combined with previous data from proton-proton collisions at to produce an observed upper limit on the branching fraction for that is a factor of 220 larger than the standard model value.