(C) 2014 Elsevier Ireland Ltd. SB203580 clinical trial All rights reserved.”
“Tumor areas can now be very precisely delimited thanks to technical progress in imaging and ballistics.

This has also led to the development of novel radiotherapy protocols, delivering higher doses of ionizing radiation directly to cancer cells. Despite this, radiation toxicity in healthy tissue remains a major issue, particularly with dose-escalation in these new protocols. Acute and late tissue damage following irradiation have both been linked to the endothelium irrigating normal tissues. The molecular mechanisms involved in the endothelial response to high doses of radiation are associated with signaling from the plasma membrane, mainly

via the acid sphingomyelinase/ceramide pathway. This review describes this signaling pathway and discusses the relevance of targeting endothelial signaling to protect healthy tissues from the deleterious effects of high doses of radiation.”
“The extent to which animal vocalizations are referential has long been debated since it reflects on the evolution of language. Our closest living relative, the chimpanzee, has been shown to have functionally referential food calls in captivity but evidence for such capabilities in the wild is lacking. We investigated the context specificity and function of West African chimpanzee, Pan troglodytes verus, food calls in the wild using all day focal follows of adult males and females of one habituated Selleckchem Blebbistatin group in the Tai forest, Cote d’Ivoire. We collected over 750 h of observation and analysed 379 food calls produced for five different food species

and found that higher pitched calls selleck kinase inhibitor were produced for a single fruit species. Additionally, within this species, chimpanzees modified calls according to tree size, whereby smaller trees elicited higher pitched calls. Our results suggest that chimpanzees subtly vary the acoustic structure of food calls with respect to food patch size for a putatively highly valued fruit species, and we propose that arousal alone cannot sufficiently explain the patterns observed. Further work is needed to determine whether variation in food call pitch can influence receiver foraging behaviour. However, in light of our results, we propose that understanding the information content encoded by acoustic variation in chimpanzee food calls requires receiver knowledge about the natural ecological context, specifically spatial memory of tree locations. Therefore, this study highlights the potential significance of feeding ecology in the evolution of flexibly modulated vocal communication. (C) 2014 The Association for the Study of Animal Behaviour. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.