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With aging and other muscle wasting diseases, men and women undergo similar pathological changes in skeletal muscle: increased inflammation, enhanced oxidative stress, mitochondrial dysfunction, satellite cell senescence, elevated apoptosis and proteasome activity, and suppressed protein synthesis and myocyte regeneration. Decreased food intake and physical activity also indirectly contribute to muscle wasting. Sex hormones also play important roles in maintaining skeletal muscle homeostasis. Testosterone is a potent anabolic factor promoting muscle protein synthesis and muscular regeneration. Estrogens have a protective effect on skeletal muscle by attenuating inflammation; however, the mechanisms of estrogen action in skeletal muscle are less well characterized than those of testosterone. Age- and/or disease-induced alterations in sex hormones are major contributors to muscle wasting. Hence, men and women may respond differently to catabolic conditions because of their hormonal profiles. Here we review the similarities and differences between men and women with common wasting conditions including sarcopenia and cachexia due to cancer, end-stage renal disease/chronic kidney disease, liver disease, chronic heart failure, and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease based on the literature in clinical studies. In addition, the responses in men and women to the commonly used therapeutic agents and their efficacy to improve muscle mass and function are also reviewed.

This paper describes the polymorphous TRIPS architecture which can be configured for different granularities and types of parallelism. TRIPS contains mechanisms that enable the processing cores and the on-chip memory system to be configured and combined in different modes for instruction, data, or thread-level parallelism. To adapt to small and large-grain concurrency, the TRIPS architecture contains four out-of-order, 16-wide-issue Grid Processor cores, which can be partitioned when easily extractable fine-grained parallelism exists. This approach to polymorphism provides better performance across a wide range of application types than an approach in which many small processors are aggregated to run workloads with irregular parallelism. Our results show that high performance can be obtained in each of the three modes--ILP, TLP, and DLP-demonstrating the viability of the polymorphous coarse-grained approach for future microprocessors.

Frailty is a clinical syndrome associated with the aging process and adverse outcomes. The purpose of this short report was to initiate the development of a Frailty Index in 27- to 28-month-old C57BL/6 mice that matched the clinical criteria used in humans (weakness, slow walking speed, low activity level, poor endurance). The selected criteria included grip strength, walking speed, physical activity, and endurance. The criteria in mice were evaluated by the inverted-cling grip test, rotarod test, voluntary wheel running, and derived endurance scores. Each criterion had a designated cutoff point (1.5 SD below the cohort mean) to identify the mice with the lowest performance. If a mouse presented with three of the criteria scores below the cutoff points, it was identified as frail. Mild frailty was designated if two criteria were below the cutoff points. In this mouse cohort, one mouse was identified as frail and one was mildly frail. This prevalence of 9% frailty is consistent with the prevalence of frailty in humans at the same survival age. Collectively, our selected criterion, cutoff point, and Frailty Index provide a potential standardized definition for frailty in mice that is consistent with the operational definition of frailty in humans.

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The small-pore pure silica zeolite ITQ-12 has been synthesized with fumed silica as the silica source in the presence of 1,3,4-trimethylimidazolium hydroxide and hydrofluoric acid under hydrothermal conditions at 448 K. Rietveld refinement using synchrotron X-ray diffraction data of the calcined ITQ-12 product taken at 298 K confirms the proposed topology, framework type code ITW, which can be described by a monoclinic unit cell [Si(24)O(48)] having Cm symmetry. Unit cell parameters are a = 10.3360(4), b = 15.0177(6), and c = 8.8639(4) A, beta = 105.356(3) degrees, and cell volume V = 1326.76(9) A(3). For as-synthesized ITQ-12, the occluded fluoride anion is located inside the double four-membered ring, while the flat 1,3,4-trimethylimidazolium cation lies on the equatorial plane of the slit-shaped [4(4)5(4)6(4)8(4)] cage, with its longest dimension in the [010] direction. The monoclinic unit cell |(C(6)N(2)H(11))(+)(2)F(-)(2)|[Si(24)O(48)], having Cm symmetry, has parameters a = 10.4478(3), b = 14.9854(4), and c = 8.8366(3) A, beta = 105.935(2) degrees, and cell volume V = 1330.34(7) A(3) at 298 K. Cooperative structure-directing effects during the crystallization of ITQ-12 are discussed in terms of the structure of the as-made material.

Data caches in general-purpose microprocessors often contain mostly dead blocks and are thus used inefficiently. To improve cache efficiency, dead blocks should be identified and evicted early. Prior schemes predict the death of a block immediately after it is accessed; however, these schemes yield lower prediction accuracy and coverage. Instead, we find that predicting the death of a block when it just moves out of the MRU position gives the best tradeoff between timeliness and prediction accuracy/coverage. Furthermore, the individual reference history of a block in the L1 cache can be irregular because of data/control dependence. This paper proposes a new class of dead-block predictors that predict dead blocks based on bursts of accesses to a cache block. A cache burst begins when a block becomes MRU and ends when it becomes non-MRU. Cache bursts are more predictable than individual references because they hide the irregularity of individual references. When used at the L1 cache, the best burst-based predictor can identify 96% of the dead blocks with a 96% accuracy. With the improved dead-block predictors, we evaluate three ways to increase cache efficiency by eliminating dead blocks early: replacement optimization, bypassing, and prefetching. The most effective approach, prefetching into dead blocks, increases the average L1 efficiency from 8% to 17% and the L2 efficiency from 17% to 27%. This increased cache efficiency translates into higher overall performance: prefetching into dead blocks outperforms the same prefetch scheme without dead-block prediction by 12% at the L1 and by 13% at the L2.

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