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The present invention relates to diagnosis and/or treatment of medical conditions. The present invention relates to new method of diagnosing dry mucosa condition in a subject. The condition may be dry eye. The present invention also provides a method to monitor the efficacy of a treatment of a dry mucosa condition, a method of treating a dry mucosa condition and/or a diagnostic kit for a dry mucosa condition.

The present invention provides an isolated oligonucleotide and a method using the isolated oligonucleotide to detect and/or identify at least two polynucleotides from a nucleic acid-protein complex. The oligonucleotide comprises at least one first tag and at least one second tag, wherein the first and second tags are obtained from a nucleic acid-protein complex.

A method for manufacturing a planar optical waveguide device of which a core includes a plurality of alternatively arranged fin portions and valley portions to form a grating structure, in which the core widths of the valley portions vary along the longitudinal direction, the method including: a high refractive index material layer forming step of forming a high refractive index material layer; a photoresist layer forming step of forming a photoresist layer on the high refractive index material layer; a first exposure step of forming shaded portions on the photoresist layer using a phase-shifting photomask; a second exposure step of forming shaded portions on the photoresist layer using a binary photomask; a development step of developing the photoresist layer; and an etching step of etching the high refractive index material layer using the photoresist pattern resulted from the development step.

A method for manufacturing a planar optical waveguide device including a core of which a top face is provided with a groove section filled with a groove section filler made of a low refractive index material having a refractive index lower than that of the core, the method including; a first high refractive index material layer forming step of forming a high refractive index material layer; a low refractive index material layer forming step of forming a low refractive index material layer made of the low refractive index material on the high refractive index material layer; a groove section filler forming step of forming the groove section filler by trimming both lateral portions of the low refractive index material layer; and a second high refractive index material layer forming step of forming a high refractive index material layer so as to fill the both sides of the lateral portions of the groove section filler.

The present invention is directed to micro- and nano-scale imprinting methods and the use of such methods to fabricate supported and/or free-standing 3-D micro- and/or nano-structures of polymeric, ceramic, and/or metallic materials. In some embodiments, a duo-mold approach is employed in the fabrication of these structures. In such methods, surface treatments are employed to impart differential surface energies to different molds and/or different parts of the mold(s). Such surface treatments permit the formation of three-dimensional (3-D) structures through imprinting and the transfer of such structures to a substrate. In some or other embodiments, such surface treatments and variation in glass transition temperature of the polymers used can facilitate separation of the 3-D structures from the molds to form free-standing micro- and/or nano-structures individually and/or in a film. In some or other embodiments, a �latch-on� assembly technique is utilized to form supported and/or free-standing stacked micro- and/or nano-structures that enable the assembly of polymers without a glass transition temperature and eliminate the heating required to assemble thermoplastic polymers.

The present invention relates to articles and methods involving porous materials (e.g., membranes) which may interact with species, such as biological molecules, cells, etc., whereby the species may adhere to or become immobilized with respect to a surface of the porous material or an adhesion layer coating the porous surface. The porous material may be capable of attaching species with control over the positioning and spatial distribution of the species across the surface of the material. Such articles and methods may be useful in, for example, biological assays, biological sensors, or in the culturing of biological cells.

Systems and methods for scalably encoding and decoding coded data are presented. One exemplary method for scalably coding data includes classifying, based upon at least one predetermined criteria, each of the plurality of data received as either (i) perceptually relevant data or (ii) perceptually irrelevant data. The perceptually relevant data is scalably coded, and the perceptually irrelevant data is non-scalably coded. Subsequently, the scalably coded perceptually relevant data and the non-scalably coded perceptually irrelevant are combined into a coded data stream for transmission.

A method for transmitting a digital signal is described, wherein the digital signal is to be transmitted by a plurality of antennas and a 2-domain pre-transformation is carried out, i.e., in course of a pre-transformation modulation symbols assigned to subcarriers having different frequencies and assigned to subcarriers sent by different antennas are linearly combined.

Method of Forming Self-assembled, Three-Dimensional Carbon Nanotube Network and Networks so Formed. Disclosed is a method for forming a self-assembled three dimensional carbon nanotube network, the method comprising: growing primary carbon nanotubes; and growing secondary carbon nanotubes, the secondary carbon nanotubes bridging and linking the primary carbon nanotubes to form the self-assembled three dimensional carbon nanotube network.

A method for training a spoken language identification system to identify an unknown language as one of a plurality of known candidate languages includes the process of creating a sound inventory comprising a plurality of sound tokens, the collective plurality of sound tokens provided from a subset of the known candidate languages. The method further includes providing a plurality of training samples, each training sample composed within one of the known candidate languages. Further included is the process of generating one or more training vectors from each training database, wherein each training vector is defined as a function of said plurality of sound tokens provided from said subset of the known candidate languages. The method further includes associating each training vector with the candidate language of the corresponding training sample.