Selective impairment of auditory selective attention under concurrent cognitive load.

Load theory predicts that concurrent cognitive load impairs selective attention. For visual stimuli, it has been shown that this impairment can be selective: Distraction was specifically increased when the stimulus material used in the cognitive load task matches that of the selective attention task. Here, we report four experiments that demonstrate such selective load effects for auditory selective attention.

"Another type of perpetrator": the SS racial experts and forced population movements in the occupied regions.

The "racial experts" of the Race and Settlement Main Office of the SS (RuSHA) were an important, yet not well studied, group of perpetrators. By setting up a procedure for "racial examination" that was applied not only to the members of the SS but also to millions of civilians in the Occupied Territories, they provided the ideological background and logistics of persecution. Following the outbreak of war, the racial experts' qualification of persons as "desirable" or "undesirable" guided National Socialist population policy and the planned ethnic reconstruction of Europe.

Functional analysis of the 5' regulatory region and the UUG translation initiation codon of the Arthrobacter oxidans 6-hydroxy-D-nicotine oxidase gene.

A functional analysis of the Arthrobacter oxidans 6-hydroxy-D-nicotine oxidase (6-HDNO) gene promoter (-35 region TTGACA and -10 region TATCAAT) and the UUG translation start codon was performed using site-directed mutagenesis. Deletion of the C residue from the -10 promoter region or mutations introduced upstream of the -10 region resulted in an increased 6-HDNO expression in Escherichia coli cells in vivo and in both E. coli and A.

Interaction of the lymphoid cell line BCL1 with lipopeptide analogues of bacterial lipoprotein: electron energy loss spectroscopy (EELS) as a novel method to detect the distribution of the activator within the cells.

The lipopeptide Pam3Cys-Ser, a synthetic analogue of the N-terminal part of bacterial lipoprotein, constitutes a potent activator for B lymphocytes, monocytes/macrophages and several lymphoid cell lines. We applied the novel method of electron energy loss spectroscopy (EELS) to determine, after stimulation, the distribution of the activator within the cell compartments of the lipopeptide sensitive cell line BCL1. Our results show that the lipopeptide, 20 min after the addition to the cell culture, was found at different locations within the cell: A major amount of the mitogen was found in the plasma membrane.

Nitro-tyrosine as promoter of free radical damage in a DNA model system.

Nitro-tyrosine considerably promotes the degradation of DNA, when incubated with Cu2+ and ascorbate in oxygenated aqueous solution. This deleterious process requires oxygen and can be inhibited with catalase, indicating that H2O2 is involved, via the reduction of oxygen. Menadione and 2,4,6-trinitrobenzenesulfonate, known to catalyze particularly fast such reduction of oxygen, were only slightly more active than nitro-tyrosine.