To elucidate the phylogenetic relationships of Hylopetes, the complete cytochrome-b gene sequences (1,140 bp) were determined from degraded museum specimens for phylogenetic study. The large genetic differences (18.1% to 20.7%) separate Eoglaucomys from Hylopetes as a distinct genus. Phylogenetic relationships reconstructed with maximum parsimony, maximum likelihood, and Bayesian methods show that all Hylopetes were genetically clustered as two major groups, the Indochinese Hylopetes group including H. alboniger and H. phayrei, and the Sundaic group consisting of H. lepidus, H. nigripes, and H. spadiceus. The close genetic relationship and the recent divergence suggest that the Indochinese group rapidly extended to their present distributions with the uplifting of the Himalayas last few million years ago, whereas the oceanic tectonic movements during the Pliocene-Pleistocene resulted in the current geographical distributions of the Sundaic group through alteration of dispersal across the islands of the Sunda Shelf.

Abstract. This paper is a review of the recent research about the design of cache coherence protocols in shared-memory multiprocessors. Two important aspects of shared memory systems are memory consistency and cache coherence. Two major available protocols for cache coherence problems are snoopy coherence and directory based coherence. The snoopy cache protocol is simple and easy to implement, but relies on a low-latency, shared interconnection among the processors and the memory modules. The directory-based multiprocessors communicate with a common directory whenever the processor's action may cause an inconsistency between its cache and the other caches or memory. No broadcast is necessary in this case and therefore the network medium may be of almost any kind. However, the overhead of directory maintenance and look-up time plus the high-latency of communication networks make the directory scheme unattractive. To prevent the directory from becoming the bottleneck, directory entries can be distributed along with the memory, so that different directory accesses can go to different locations.

To investigate the effect of noise pollution on serum sex hormone levels in rats. Choose 40 Wistar rats were randomly divided into control group (normal), experimental group (further divided into 30, 60 and 80 dB three groups), each group 10 animals, stimulated for 30 min once a day, continually stimulated for consecutive 20 days. On the 21th day of experiment, the serum sex hormone levels were determined by enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA). The results showed that the serum E2 and FSH levels were increased by 51.68%, 69.28%, 81.28% and 22.76%, 49.43%, 87.64%, respectively, LH and PRL levels were increased by 16.31%, 34.79%, 75.24% and 16.51%, 36.04%, 60.55% compared with the control group; the serum T level was decreased by 9.12%, 20.06%, 68.39%, respectively. The results showed the noise pollution can significantly affect the serum sex hormone levels in rats.

The chronic low-frequency stimulation could stimulate the expression of c-fos gene in the prefrontal cortex and enhance the endothelin-1 (ET-1) levels of liver and spleen in tree shrew (Tupaia). Our results suggested that application of chronic low-frequency stimulations yielded significant c-Fos protein expression in the prefrontal cortex of tree shrews. After 3 h of death, the average ET-1 concentrations of the live and spleen in both control and treatment groups were significantly decreased by 30.2%-20.5% and 21.3%-22.5%, respectively. The ET-1 levels of the liver and spleen are highly correlated over the elapsed time periods in both control and treatment groups. The significant enhancement of the c-fos gene expression and the ET-1 level suggested that c-fos gene and ET-1 play an important role in the defensive mechanisms against stress stimuli. The ET-1 postmortem changes could be used to estimate the postmortem intervals during the decay process.