Puerariae flos (PF) is a traditional oriental medicinal plant and has clinically been prescribed for a long time. The purpose of the present study was to examine the effect of PF on repeated stress-induced alterations of learning and memory on a Morris water maze (MW M) test in ovariectomized (OVX) female rats. The changes in the reactivity of the cholinergic system were assessed by measuring the immunoreactive neurons of choline acetyltransferase (ChAT) in the hippocampus after behavioral testing. The female rats were randomly divided into four groups: the nonoperated and nonstressed group (normal), the sham-operated and stressed group (control), the ovariectomized and stressed group (OS), and the ovariectomized, stressed and PF treated group (OSF). Rats were exposed to immobilization stress (IMO) for 14 d (2 h/d), and PF (400 mg/kg, p.o.) was administered 30 min before IMO stress. Results showed that treatments with PF caused significant reversals of the stress-induced deficits in learning and memory on a spatial memory task, and also increased the ChAT immunoreactivities. In conclusion, administration of PF improved spatial learning and memory in OVX rats, and PF may be useful for the treatment of postmenopausal-related dementia.

A very promising application of active RFID systems is the electronic seal, an electronic device to guarantee the authenticity and integrity of freight containers. To provide freight containers with a high level of tamper resistance, the security of electronic seals must be ensured. In this paper, we present the design and implementation of an electronic seal protection system. First, we propose the eSeal Protection Protocol (ePP). Next, we implement and evaluate various cryptographic primitives as building blocks for our protocol. Our experimental results show that AES‐CBC‐MAC achieves the best performance among various schemes for message authentication and session key derivation. Finally, we implement a new electronic seal system equipped with ePP, and evaluate its performance using a real‐world platform. Our evaluation shows that ePP guarantees a sufficient performance over an ARM9‐based interrogator.

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