Low aLM/BMI is associated with significantly increased likelihood of MetS in Australian adults, but not Koreans, suggesting potential differences in effects of low muscle mass relative to body mass on cardiometabolic health in Caucasian and Asian middle-aged and older adults. Low muscle mass relative to height is associated with reduced likelihood of MetS in both populations.

ObjectivesSarcopenia and visceral obesity have been suggested to aggravate each other, resulting in a vicious cycle. However, evidence based on prospective study is very limited. Our purpose was to investigate whether visceral fat promotes a decrease in skeletal muscle mass and vice versa.MethodsWe observed changes in anthropometric and body composition data during a follow-up period of 27.6±2.8 months in 379 Korean men and women (mean age 51.9±14.6 years) from the Korean Sarcopenic Obesity Study (KSOS). Appendicular lean soft tissue (ALST) mass was calculated using dual-energy X-ray absorptiometry, and visceral fat area (VFA) was measured using computed tomography at baseline and follow-up examination.ResultsALST mass significantly decreased, whereas trunk and total fat mass increased in both men and women despite no significant change in weight and body mass index. In particular, women with visceral obesity at baseline had a greater decrease in ALST mass than those without visceral obesity (P = 0.001). In multiple linear regression analysis, baseline VFA was an independent negative predictor of the changes in ALST after adjusting for confounding factors including age, gender, life style and body composition parameters, insulin resistance, high sensitivity C-reactive protein and vitamin D levels (P = 0.001), whereas the association between baseline ALST mass and changes in VFA was not statistically significant (P = 0.555).ConclusionsThis longitudinal study showed that visceral obesity was associated with future loss of skeletal muscle mass in Korean adults. These results may provide novel insight into sarcopenic obesity in an aging society.

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Application launch performance is of great importance to system platform developers and vendors as it greatly affects the degree of users' satisfaction. The single most effective way to improve application launch performance is to replace a hard disk drive (HDD) with a solid state drive (SSD), which has recently become affordable and popular. A natural question is then whether or not to replace the traditional HDD-aware application launchers with a new SSD-aware optimizer. We address this question by analyzing the inefficiency of the HDD-aware application launchers on SSDs and then proposing a new SSD-aware application prefetching scheme, called the Fast Application STarter (FAST). The key idea of FAST is to overlap the computation (CPU) time with the SSD access (I/O) time during an application launch. FAST is composed of a set of user-level components and system debugging tools provided by Linux OS (operating system). Hence, FAST can be easily deployed in any recent Linux versions without kernel recompilation. We implement FAST on a desktop PC with an SSD running Linux 2.6.32 OS and evaluate it by launching a set of widely-used applications, demonstrating an average of 28% reduction of application launch time as compared to PC without a prefetcher.

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Fischer–Tropsch synthesis (FTS) for the production of gasoline and middle distillates in the range of C5–C22 hydrocarbons was investigated using ZSM5-modified Co/SiO2 FTS catalysts. The Co/SiO2 catalyst was prepared by an impregnation method using a cobalt nitrate precursor in a slurry of SiO2, and theh ZSM5-modified Co/SiO2 catalyst was subsequently prepared by synthesizing ZSM5 (Si/Al ratio = 40) by in situ hydrothermal synthesis over the Co/SiO2 catalyst at different ZSM5/(Co/SiO2) weight ratios. The catalytic performance was largely altered by changing acidity and reducibility of cobalt oxides on ZSM5-modified Co/SiO2 catalysts due to the different extents of migration of cobalt oxides from SiO2 to the ZSM5 surface with different degrees of catalytic olefin cracking reaction. The ZSM5-modified Co/SiO2 catalyst with 25 wt %ZSM5 shows a maximum selectivity to C5–C22 hydrocarbons with a high CO conversion due to the smaller cobalt crystallite size possessing a high reducibility and optimum acid site density. The superior catalytic performance on the ZSM5-modified Co/SiO2 catalysts is mainly attributed to the modification of the Co/SiO2 surface with the presence of adjacent ZSM5 particles and the possible migration of cobalt species from SiO2 to the ZSM5 surface during the hydrothermal synthesis of ZSM5.

Fischer-Tropsch synthesis (FTS) reaction for the direct production of gasoline range hydrocarbons (C 5 -C 9 ) from syngas was investigated on cobalt-based FTS catalyst supported on the ZSM-5 possessing a four different Si/Al ratio. The FTS catalysts were prepared by impregnation method using cobalt nitrate precursor in a slurry of ZSM-5, and they were characterized by surface area, XRD, H 2 -TPR and NH 3 -TPD. Cobalt supported catalyst on ZSM-5 having a low Si/Al ratio of 15 was found to be superior to the other catalysts in terms of better C 5 -C 9 selectivity due to the formation of small cobalt particle and the presence of larger number of weak acidic sites. It also exhibited the highest catalytic activity because of the higher reducibility and the small cobalt particle size.