Description: This paper accompanies a poster presentation on the anti-diabetic and cholesterol-lowering effects of common and cassia cinnamon (Cinnamomum verum and C. aromaticum). According to the World Health Organization (WHO), approximately 150 million people worldwide have type 2 diabetes. It is a growing health concern. Common and cassia cinnamon have been reported to have anti-diabetic and lipid-lowering effects. The objective was to determine if the combination of common and cassia cinnamon (Cinnamomum verum and C. aromaticum) reduces fasting blood glucose, insulin, glycosylated hemoglobin (HA1C), triglyceride, total cholesterol, HDL cholesterol and LDL cholesterol levels in people with type 2 diabetes.

Description: In this paper, the authors show using scanning tunneling microscopy, spectroscopy, and ab initio calculations that several intercalation structures exist for Na in epitaxial graphene on SiC(0001). Intercalation takes place at room temperature and Na electron-dopes the graphene. It intercalates in-between single-layer graphene and the carbon-rich interfacial layer. It also penetrates beneath the interfacial layer and decouples it to form a second graphene layer. This decoupling is accelerated by annealing and is verified by direct Na deposition onto the interface layer. The authors' observations show that intercalation in graphene is fundamentally different than in graphite and is a versatile means of electronic control.

Description: This paper discusses a grant project to develop a series of experimental models for combining possibilities of text-mining with geospatial mapping in order to unlock the research potential of large-scale collections of historical newspapers. This paper documents the experiments and their outcomes, as well as the authors' recommendations for future work.

Description: This paper discusses an ad hoc query tool for relational databases. Most Web servers hosting biological data limit users to a defined set of search options and output formats that are short of the whole range of options available to users with direct database access. However, to make full use of the wealth of data in the database resource, it is desirable to have an intermediate solution that provides a broad range of flexible query and output options through a Web portal.

Description: This paper discusses expressed sequence tag sequencing over grid and cloud computing clusters. Abstract: Computer-intensive biological applications are heavily reliant on the availability of computing resources. Grid based HPC clusters and emerging Cloud computing clusters provide a large scale computing environment for scientific users. However, large scale biological application often involves various types of computational tasks which can benefit from different types of computing clusters. Therefore, a high level job scheduling environment which integrates the Grid style HPC clusters and the Cloud computing clusters and manages jobs accordingly based on the characteristics of the jobs is required. In this paper, the authors propose a Web service framework for high-level job scheduling - Swarm. Swarm is developed for scientific applications that must submit massive number of high-throughput jobs or workflows to highly distributed computing clusters. Swarm allows the users to submit jobs to both Grid HPC and Cloud computing clusters. The Swarm service itself is designed to be extensible, lightweight, and easily installable on a desktop or a small server. As a Web service, derivative services based on Swarm can be straightforwardly integrated with Web portals and science gateways. This paper provides the motivation for this research, the architecture of the ...