Abstract: The present invention is directed to methods and kits for diagnosing, Alzheimer's disease. The invention is based, in part, on the discovery that proteolytic fragments of the amino and carboxy terminal amino acid residues of tau-proteins are released from the neurofibrillary tangles associated with the disease and can be detected in body fluids outside the brain. The tau-proteins will be purified or chemically synthesized and peptide fragments of the amino terminal and carboxy terminal regions will be obtained proteolytically or synthesized chemically and will be used in generating tau specific antibodies for use in diagnostic kits for the detection of Alzheimer's disease. These diagnostic kits will be used in screening the body fluids of individuals for the presence of tau-peptide fragments. Alternatively, the tau-peptides themselves may be used in diagnostic kits for screening the body fluids of individuals for the presence of circulating autoantibodies.

Abstract: A stable memory circuit which includes a pair of memory banks (2(a)) and (2(b)) each having eight arrays of eight VRAMs (3). Each VRAM (3) is dual-ported and includes a processor port connected to a processor bus (6) and a stable memory port connected to a stable memory bus (7). Accordingly, stable memory operations such as copying operations may be carried out on the stable memory bus (7) concurrently with conventional random accesses by a host processor via the processor port (6) and with very little use of processor time. Further, the stable memory ports of VRAMs (3) are serial ports and each memory bank (2(a)) and (2(b)) may transfer data at high speed using wide serial data path.