The proposed theory shows that, by using optical fiber delay lines or loops, it is no longer necessary to compress pulses with matched filters for optimum detection and it is possible to suppress interference from undesirable zones. The suppression leads to lessening of Doppler and range ambiguity. The theory further shows that it is feasible to measure Doppler beating with high precision based on a single pulse. Thus, with a single pulse, there is no Doppler and range ambiguity; interference from undesirable range zones due to Doppler range fold-over will no longer present; and the troublesome ground clutter problem would be greatly suppressed. The high precision Doppler beating provides a mechanism to reveal intrinsic characteristics of a target without time average blurring or masking. New information can be acquired on targets of interest for purpose of passive identification.


Mammary myofibroblastoma is a benign mesenchymal tumor composed of fibroblasts, myofibroblasts, and a variable number of adipocytes. Mammary myofibroblastoma usually occurs in men of older age and is less common in postmenopausal women. It may also happen in extramammary sites along the milk line. In this instance, it is referred to as mammary-type myofibroblastoma. Rarely multifocal and bilateral tumors have been described. Clinically and radiologically, it can be misinterpreted as a malignant tumor due to its rarity. Size usually does not exceed 3 cm. The diagnosis requires clinicopathological correlation with morphological and immunohistochemical evaluation, especially in limited biopsy specimens. We herewith describe a rare case of mammary myofibroblastoma in a 37-year-old female patient. We also review the literature focusing on the potential differential diagnostic issues and discuss this tumor's ultrastructural and cytogenetic findings.


We present explicit sufficient conditions that guarantee the existence and uniqueness of the load-flow solution for distribution networks with a generic topology (radial or meshed) modeled with positive sequence equivalents. In the problem, we also account for the presence of shunt elements. The conditions have low computational complexity and thus can be efficiently verified in a real system. Once the conditions are satisfied, the unique load-flow solution can be reached by a given fixed point iteration method of approximately linear complexity. Therefore, the proposed approach is of particular interest for modern active distribution network setup in the context of real-time control. The theory has been confirmed through numerical experiments.


Heat transfer theory suggests that floodplain soils in dryland riverine ecosystems can be cooled by hyporheic flows generated during spring floods. I compared soil temperature cycles and associated hydrologic factors on a free‐flowing river to those on a river where flows and surface water temperatures are now regulated. Spring surface water temperatures were comparable on the 2 rivers, as was apparent diffusivity of the soil under mature Populus fremontii in a year when severe drought produced similar soil moisture regimes. Over 9 years of monitoring, mean annual maximum soil temperature was higher on the regulated river than on the free‐flowing river (10 cm depth: 33 vs. 23 °C; 40 cm depth: 30 vs. 20°C, respectively), and sinusoidal models of the annual temperature cycle at each depth indicated higher means and greater amplitudes on the regulated river. The annual maximum soil temperature was inversely related to peak flood discharge on the free‐flowing river but not on the regulated river. Temporal shifts in the lag between diel cycles at 40 and 10 cm depths—an index of soil thermal diffusivity—suggested that the capillary fringe is strongly involved in heat exchange. An increase in the lag during some water table declines suggested that shallow soils may undergo flood‐induced evaporative cooling. Hyporheic recharge can be an ecologically important determinant of growing‐season soil temperatures at plant rooting depth in dryland river floodplains. Reductions in spring flood magnitude due to river regulation, water abstraction, or climate change can increase these temperatures and thereby alter ecosystem structure and functioning.


Mitochondrial (mt) tRNA (MTT) gene mutations are an important cause of mitochondrial diseases and are associated with a wide range of clinical presentations. Most mutations fall into three mitochondrial tRNAs (tRNAIle, tRNALeu (UUR), and tRNALys) and are responsible for half of the mitochondrial diseasees associated with tRNA mutation, with MERRF, MELAS, mitochondrial myopathy, and Leigh syndrome being the most frequent phenotypes. More than 100 tRNA pathogenetic mutations are described, showing little correlation between the observed clinical phenotype and a specific mitochondrial tRNA mutation. Furthermore different mutation can manifest with similar clinical phenotypes, making the genotype-phenotype correlation difficult. Here we report the case of an Italian 53-year-old woman presenting with a proximal myopathy and the m.5835G>A mutation in MT-TY gene coding for the mitochondrial tRNA Tyrosine gene.


This paper reports on a new method for estimation and minimization of mechanical stress on MEMS sensor and actuator structures due to packaging processes based on flip chip technology. For studying mechanical stress a test chip with silicon diaphragms was fabricated. A network of piezo-resistive solid state resistors created by diffusion was used to measure the surface tension pattern between adjacent diaphragms. Finite element method simulation was used to calculate the stress profile and to determine the optimum positions for placing the resistive network.


Albert Vandel and Pierre-Paul Grasse were influential and academically acclaimed zoologists in France in the second half of the 20th century. They were among the last scientific adversaries of Neo-Darwinism in France, proposing instead a form of Neo-Lamarckism up until the 1980s. Their theories were not equivalent but were both founded on the idea that evolution is internally driven, teleologically orientated but also « creative » in the sense that it generates unpredictable novelties. However, they proposed no alternative mechanism to replace natural selection. My analysis of their scientific, epistemological and metaphysical arguments shows that their take on evolution relied on cosmogonical and metaphysical explanations, founded on elements from Henri Bergson's metaphysics of duration and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin's theological cosmogony. Despite theoretical differences they shared ideas about mankind's nature and destiny in the universe, which justified, in their view, their repudiation of Darwinian adaptation and chance as well as their philosophical vision of evolution.


In many unpaired image domain translation problems, e.g., style transfer or super-resolution, it is important to keep the translated image similar to its respective input image. We propose the extremal transport (ET) which is a mathematical formalization of the theoretically best possible unpaired translation between a pair of domains w.r.t. the given similarity function. Inspired by the recent advances in neural optimal transport (OT), we propose a scalable algorithm to approximate ET maps as a limit of partial OT maps. We test our algorithm on toy examples and on the unpaired image-to-image translation task. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/milenagazdieva/ExtremalNeuralOptimalTransport


Jointly consider the demand risk and exchange rate risk of the global supply chain. With a Two-echelon Supply Chain under global environment for modeling background, this paper establishes a dynamic game model about manufacturer and retailer, gains the results of the equilibrium, studies how the uncertainty of the exchange rate and exogenous demand influence the manufacturer's original wholesale price , incentive degree, the retailer's order quantity and exchange rate risk hedge strategy. The results show that the manufacturer's original wholesale price and the incentive degree are unaffected by exchange rate and demand exogenous fluctuation. The retailer's order quantity is unaffected by exchange rate exogenous fluctuation, but decreases with an increase in the demand exogenous fluctuation. The retailer's exchange rate risk exposure proportion decreases with an increase in the exchange rate exogenous fluctuation, and increases with an increase in the demand exogenous fluctuation. The results indicate that the retailer's exchange rate risk hedge strategy can stabilize the supply chain operation strategy.


Experimentally observed superdeformed (SD) rotational bands in 36Ar and 40Ar are studied by the cranked shell model (CSM) with the pairing correlations treated by a particle-number-conserving (PNC) method. This is the first time that PNC-CSM calculations have been performed on the light nuclear mass region around A=40. The experimental kinematic moments of inertia J(1) versus rotational frequency are reproduced well. The backbending of the SD band at frequency around ℏω=1.5 MeV in 36Ar is attributed to the sharp rise of the simultaneous alignments of the neutron and proton 1d5/2[202]5/2 pairs and 1f7/2[321]3/2 pairs, which is a consequence of the band crossing between the 1d5/2[202]5/2 and 1f7/2[321]3/2 configuration states. The gentle upbending at low frequency of the SD band in 40Ar is mainly affected by the alignments of the neutron 1f7/2[321]3/2 pairs and proton 1d5/2[202]5/2 pairs. The PNC-CSM calculations show that besides the diagonal parts, the off-diagonal parts of the alignments play an important role in the rotational behavior of the SD bands.


Aim: To evaluate number and quality of publications in gastroenterology, hepatology and digestive endoscopy from Western Europe (Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Great Britain, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland), Japan and USA over a recent 5-year period. Methods: We screened by computer for full liver/gastrointestinal-related articles and reviews the top 40% of journals (according to the annual rating of the SCI Journal Citation Reports; Institute for Scientific Information database) in most clinical and basic science disciplines in the years 1992–1996. To be credited with an article, a given country had to be the site of the first institution where the work was conducted. Papers were rated according to the impact factor of the Institute for Scientific Information and to the ratio impact factor/mean European impact factor. Data were also normalized for nondefense research and development expenditure. Results and Conclusions: As randomly tested, the computer search had an error of ± 5–10%. In Europe, Great Britain achieved the highest total impact factor and the highest number of papers. Most of the British impact factor came from publications in British journals. The total USA impact factor exceeded that of Europe by 20%. The average impact factor for a single paper was highest for the USA and, in Europe, for Germany. The temporal trend of total impact factor showed Spain improving by 9% per year, with Germany and Italy also displaying a substantial growth. Expressed per funds allocated in nondefense research and development, Great Britain and the USA had the highest cumulative impact factor.


Abstract The present article demonstrates the clinical application and the efficacy of relaxation techniques in general hospital psychiatry in Japan. During April to December 1993, 20 patients were treated with progressive muscle relaxation and 'modified' autogenic training therapies. The targeted symptoms were anxiety attacks (or panic attacks), neurotic insomnia, hyperventilation syndrome, agoraphobia, chronic pain, and distress. Most patients (18/20) improved rapidly with the use of these techniques and their excellence encourages increased use in general hospital psychiatry for the following reasons. First, physically ill patients are likely to show unexpected reactions to psychotropic medications. Second, some patients prefer these treatment methods rather than medications because they feel that they are participating voluntarily in their own treatment and also because they are fearful of being addicted to tranquilizers. Third, these treatments have produced rapid improvement especially for patients with panic attacks and/or hyperventilation. This study strongly suggests that progressive muscle relaxation and 'modified' autogenic training are simple and useful methods which can be easily employed in the clinical practice of general hospital psychiatry.


OBJECTIVE
To improve the surgeon's understanding of pyoderma gangrenosum (PG) and avoid misdiagnosis and incorrect treatment.

METHODS
Three cases of PG managed in the department of general surgery during the past 10 years were retrospectively reviewed.

RESULTS
All of the 3 cases mainly presented with necrosis of skin and soft tissues, followed by formation of painful and extensive creeping ulcer. They all had fever and were initially diagnosed and managed as "infection", but repeated wound exudates culture showed negative results and antimicrobial therapy was not effective. The ulcers were enlarged quickly despite of active debridement. Histopathology of ulcer biopsy suggested nonspecific inflammation. After the diagnosis of PG was established, systemic therapy with steroids and immunosuppressants were administered together with local wound care. The progress of the disease was controlled soon and fully resolved finally.

CONCLUSIONS
Pyoderma gangrenosum is misdiagnosed frequently. For severe patients, systemic therapy with steroids and immunosuppressants should be used as early as possible and skin lesions would heal together with mild local wound care.


Microalgae have great advantages as a new biomass source for fuel production. But microalgae are photosynthetic microorganisms, which normally grow in the light. Because of this growth condition, the commercial viability of microalgal biofuel is limited by current production systems. To obtain microalgal biofuel, fermentation is a more convenient, more economical and practical industry model. In this study, we asked whether and why the dark fermentation of C. ellipsoidea SD-0701 could be achieved by changing the culture medium formula. We focused the research on carbon-containing compounds and the initial pH of media. The results indicated that glucose was the optimum carbon-containing compound, which provided C. ellipsoidea SD-0701 with energy and carbon skeleton for accumulating organic compounds including lipids. When C. ellipsoidea SD-0701 was cultivated in the add-nutrition medium containing glucose, the optimum initial pH for the growth of C. ellipsoidea SD-0701 was pH 7.71. Therefore, if the suitable medium is used, C. ellipsoidea SD-0701 can grow normally in the dark, which is the same condition as the fermenter, and high microalgal biomass (0.50 g&middotL-1) and lipid yield (232.90 mg&middotL-1) can be achieved.


Inorganic nanoparticles such as silica, and titanium oxide, are widely used industrially as fillers and pigments for polymer materials, because inorganic nanoparticles have excellent properties such as chemical, heat and weather resistance, lightweight, thermal conductivity and low thermal expansion. On the other hand, nanocarbons, such as carbon black, nanodiamond, and carbon nanotube, are well known as one of the industrially important carbon materials. Carbon materials also have outstanding properties such as electro-conductivity, heat-resistance, biocompatibility, and chemical-resistance. Carbon nanotubes in particular have attracted attention as nanotechnology related materials. In general, dispersing inorganic nanoparticle and nanocarbons uniformly into a polymer or an organic solvent is very difficult because of aggregation. In addition, the mechanical properties of polymer composite from nanoparticles and nanocarbons are considered to depend on not only the mechanical properties of the polymer matrix but also on the properties of interfacial regions between surface of nanoparticles and matrix polymers. The chemical and physical modifications of inorganic nanoparticle and nanocarbon surfaces, therefore, have been extensively studied. The chemical modification of surfaces is permanent, but physical modification is temporary. We have pointed out that the dispersibility of silica nanoparticles and nanocarbons is extremely improved by surface grafting of polymers, namely, chemical binding of polymers, onto nanoparticle and nanocarbon surfaces (Tsubokawa, 1999; Tsubokawa, 2002; Tsubokawa, 2007). In addition grafting of polymers onto these surfaces interests us for designing new functional composite materials which have the excellent properties both of nanoparticles as mentioned above and of grafted polymers, such as photosensitivity, biorepellent activity, antibacterial activity, and pharmacological activity (Tsubokawa, 2007). We have succeeded in the grafting of various polymers such as vinyl polymer (Tsubokawa et al., 1988a; Tsubokawa et al., 1990; Fujiki et al., 1990; Tsubokawa et al., 1992a), polyester (Tsubokawa et al., 1982; Tsubokawa et al., 1983), polyether (Tsubokawa et al., 1986; Tsubokawa et al., 1988b), poly(organophosphazene) (Tsubokawa et al., 1992b), and poly(dimethysiloxane) (Tsubokawa et al., 1992c) onto silica nanoparticle and carbon black surfaces using surface functional groups as grafting sites. Furthermore, many experimental attempts by other researchers also have been made to graft polymers onto silica nanoparticle and carbon black surfaces.


Online booking platform eases customer to book hotel easily prior to the arrival date. However, problem arises if customer thinks hotel quality is not as good as promised on online booking platform. Hotel rating which is presented on online booking platform is not sufficient to fully represent hotel quality in terms of services and facilities. To fill in the gap, hotel reviews can be used to depict hotel quality in details. However, hotel reviews can be written in multi-language and the amount is too much, which makes it harder to be understood. On the other hand, hotel's management also needs to regularly monitor hotel quality perceived by the customer in order to maintain and improve hotel quality. Therefore, this research proposes system to analyze, classify, and predict hotel quality using aggregation of hotel rating and review. The proposed system uses factor aggregation of sentiment polarization approach in vaderSentiment and SentiwordNet which uses different methods (Lexicon-based and Rule-based) to calculate sentiment degree of hotel reviews. Before being analyzed using sentiment analysis, multi-language review is standardized automatically into English. Descriptive and predictive analysis are conducted in big data environment using Hierarchical K-Means Clustering and Smoothing Exponential method respectively. The results of sentiment aggregation that are used as a feature in descriptive and predictive method enriches the analysis for the better result Performance of this approach is 12,47% for prediction error and 4,61% error rate for clustering model. It produced better result hotel segmentation and predictions of hotel quality. This study can give an advantage for both the customer and the hotel management in analyzing the development of hotel quality.


ABSTRACTIn the Pueblo Southwest, great kivas are considered to represent communal, public architecture—spaces where groups of people came together to perform ceremonies, discuss matters of concern, and conduct social or economic transactions. Great kivas are geographically widespread and assume a variety of shapes and sizes. This study examines the distribution and size of Chacoan great kivas constructed in outlier communities in the San Juan Basin during the Late Pueblo H period or Classic Bonito phase (A.D. 1040–;1120). Great kivas are less common in outlier communities near Chaco Canyon, suggesting that people living close to Chaco used integrative facilities located in the canyon. Great kiva area does not appear to be related to population size in Chaco outlier communities, suggesting that the iconographic form of the great kiva was more important than structure size. Great kiva spaces were more than containers for activities. In order to understand their meanings in Chacoan social contexts, it is nec...


This paper describes the introduction of a self-medication programme for elderly in-patients using action research. The programme was initiated by a steering group which met regularly to implement and monitor self-medication. Ward staff were interviewed to assess their learning needs before the start, meetings were held as the project advanced, and a final staff evaluation questionnaire was administered. Patients' opinions were also monitored. Self-medication was successfully introduced and minor problems were rapidly solved by participating staff. Patients were highly satisfied with the new independence and self-esteem they had gained through taking their own medications. Nurses shared these feelings, but also felt that self-medication was more time consuming than previous drug rounds. Suggestions for further research and development are given.


The aim of the present study is to elucidate the correlation between etiology and histology in nasal polyps with special regard to cystic fibrosis (CF). Nasal polyps from 15 children with CF and a control group of non-CF polyps from 15 adult patients were examined by light-microscopy. The histological evaluation was carried out on a blind basis in order to avoid bias. Among the parameters used, the tissue eosinophilia proved to be the most valuable factor in the differentiation between CF and non-CF polyps, as only few eosinophils were found in the CF-polyps. The polyp glands were few and generally pathological. Some characteristics abnormalities in the grandular morphology are apparently more common in CF polyps. It is concluded, that the histological examination of nasal polyps is of importance for the correct classification of the patient, but the diagnosis of CF cannot be made based on microscopy of polyps. Further studies including blinded histological examination of nasal polypous tissue might contribute to a more differentiated diagnose of nasal polyposis.


Human activity recognition (HAR) has recently become a popular research field in the wearable sensor technology scene. By analyzing the human behavior data, some disease risks or potential health issues can be detected, and patients' rehabilitation progress can be evaluated. With the excellent performance of Transformer in natural language processing and visual tasks, researchers have begun to focus on its application in time series. The Transformer model models long-term dependencies between sequences through self-attention mechanisms, capturing contextual information over extended periods. In this paper, we propose a hybrid model based on the channel attention mechanism and Transformer model to improve the feature representation ability of sensor-based HAR tasks. Extensive experiments were conducted on three public HAR datasets, and the results show that our network achieved accuracies of 98.10%, 97.21%, and 98.82% on the HARTH, PAMAP2, and UCI-HAR datasets, respectively, The overall performance is at the level of the most advanced methods.


ABSTRACT The objective of this paper is to examine whether and, if so, to what degree car ownership preferences of different age cohorts are changing over time. This question is examined by estimating a joint discrete choice model for car ownership at the household level. To identify change with respect to period, age, and generation, while also controlling for a variety of confounding factors, a model with time-varying coefficients is formulated. The model is applied to multiple cross-sectional data collected in Denmark from 2007 to 2017. Results reveal a significant reduction in car ownership for young age cohorts (18–37 years) and an increase in the likelihood to own two or more cars for age cohorts between 58 and 67 years. The implications of these findings are exemplified and discussed by estimating different parametric functions to capture the evolution of preferences over time.


Abstract Viral content on the internet has become part of our everyday lives. It has even made its way into defamation litigation. This article explores how viral content is changing the legal definition of limited-purpose and involuntary public figures. The article argues that courts should not consider having access to social media alone as having "access to media" under the test for deciding when an individual is a limited-purpose public figure. Additionally, courts should focus the analysis on determining whether plaintiffs voluntarily injected themselves into a controversy to sway public opinion or to resolve the controversy either via the viral content or with other behavior. More importantly, we argue courts should no longer recognize involuntary public figures. Although some authors have suggested that in the age of the internet it makes sense to require more individuals to prove actual malice, we suggest courts should use a lower standard for some individuals to better compensate for injury to reputation.


This paper proposes a different method for calculating a sound field diffracted by a rigid barrier based on the integral equation method, where a virtual boundary is assumed above the rigid barrier to divide the whole space into two subspaces. Based on the Kirchhoff-Helmholtz equation, the sound field in each subspace is determined with the source inside and the boundary conditions on the surface, and then the diffracted sound field is obtained by using the continuation conditions on the virtual boundary. Simulations are carried out to verify the feasibility of the proposed method. Compared to the MacDonald method and other existing methods, the proposed method is a rigorous solution for whole space and is also much easier to understand.


INTRODUCTION
The functional interplay between cementum of the root and alveolar bone of the socket is tuned by a uniquely positioned 70-80 µm wide fibrous and lubricious ligament in a dentoalveolar joint (DAJ). In this study, structural and biomechanical properties of the DAJ, periodontal ligament space (PDL-space also known as the joint space), alveolar bone of the socket, and cementum of the tooth root that govern the biomechanics of a lipopolysaccharide (LPS)-affected DAJ were mapped both in space and time.

METHODS
The hemi-maxillae from 20 rats (4 control at 6 weeks of age, 4 control and 4 LPS-affected at 12 weeks of age, 4 control and 4 LPS-affected at 16 weeks of age) were investigated using a hybrid technique; micro-X-ray computed tomography (5 µm resolution) in combination with biomechanical testing in situ. Temporal variations in bone and cementum volume fractions were evaluated. Trends in mineral apposition rates (MAR) in additional six Sprague Dawley rats (3 controls, 3 LPS-affected) were revealed by transforming spatial fluorochrome signals to functional growth rates (linearity factor - RW) of bone, dentin, and cementum using a fast Fourier transform on fluorochrome signals from 100-µm hemi-maxillae sections.

RESULTS
An overall change in LPS-affected DAJ biomechanics (a 2.5-4.5X increase in tooth displacement and 2X tooth rotation at 6 weeks, no increase in displacement and a 7X increase in rotation at 12 weeks; 27% increase in bone effective strain at 6 weeks and 11% at 12 weeks relative to control) was associated with structural changes in the coronal regions of the DAJ (15% increase in PDL-space from 0 to 6 weeks but only 5% from 6 to 12 weeks compared to control). A significant increase (p < 0.05) in PDL-space between ligated and age-matched control was observed. The bone fraction of ligated at 12 weeks was significantly lower than its age-matched control, and no significant differences (p > 0.05) between groups were observed at 6 weeks. Cementum in the apical regions grew faster but nonlinearly (11% and 20% increase in cementum fraction (CF) at 6 and 12 weeks) compared to control. Alveolar bone revealed site-specific nonlinear growth with an overall increase in MAR (108.5 µm/week to 126.7 µm/week after LPS treatment) compared to dentin (28.3 µm/week in control vs. 26.1 µm/week in LPS-affected) and cementum (126.5 µm/week in control vs. 119.9 µm/week in LPS-affected). A significant increase in CF (p < 0.05) in ligated specimens was observed at 6 weeks of age.

CONCLUSIONS
Anatomy-specific responses of cementum and bone to the mechano-chemo stimuli, and their collective temporal contribution to observed changes in PDL-space were perpetuated by altered tooth movement. Data highlight the "resilience" of DAJ function through the predominance of nonlinear growth response of cementum, changes in PDL-space, and bone architecture. Despite the significant differences in bone and cementum architectures, data provided insights into the reactionary effects of cementum as a built-in compensatory mechanism to reestablish functional competence of the DAJ. The spatial shifts in architectures of alveolar bone and cementum, and consequently ligament space, highlight adaptations farther away from the site of insult, which also is another novel insight from this study. These adaptations when correlated within the context of joint function (biomechanics) illustrate that they are indeed necessary to sustain DAJ function albeit being pathological.


Antihypertensive drugs with pharmacological action due to sympatholytic activity have been second only to diuretics in their use and efficacy in normalizing blood pressure. Their pharmacological actions have resulted in the notable absence of chemical toxicity, but because of symptomatic side effects, their use has been limited relative to some of the newer antihypertensive agents. Most prominent among undesirable side effects are the central nervous system findings of sedation, altered thought process, depression, and orthostatic or exercise hypotension. Sexual problems, especially in men, are also prominent. Special toxicity is discussed with reference to methyldopa, clonidine, monoamine oxidase inhibitors, and metyrosine.


The crystal phase of nanostructured metal oxide can be effectively controlled by the hybridization of gallium oxide with reduced graphene oxide (rGO) at variable concentrations. The change of the ratio of Ga2O3/rGO is quite effective in tailoring the crystal structure and morphology of nanostructured gallium oxide hybridized with rGO. This is the first example of the phase control of metal oxide through a change of the content of rGO hybridized. The calculations based on density functional theory (DFT) clearly demonstrate that the different surface formation energy and Ga local symmetry of Ga2O3 phases are responsible for the phase transition induced by the change of rGO content. The resulting Ga2O3-rGO nanocomposites show promising electrode performance for lithium ion batteries. The intermediate Li-Ga alloy phases formed during the electrochemical cycling are identified with the DFT calculations. Among the present Ga2O3-rGO nanocomposites, the material with mixed α-Ga2O3/β-Ga2O3/γ-Ga2O3 phase can deliver the largest discharge capacity with the best cyclability and rate characteristics, highlighting the importance of the control of Ga2O3/rGO ratio in optimizing the electrode activity of the composite materials. The present study underscores the usefulness of the phase-control of nanostructured metal oxides achieved by the change of rGO content in exploring novel functional nanocomposite materials.


This is a review of the year 2000 literature that summarizes analytical techniques for the detection and quantification of organic and inorganic chemical species in drinking water, wastewater, and natural waters. The review emphasizes techniques that are relevant to the environmental engineering and science community. The review is divided into four main sections including new chemical methods, new biological methods, new sample preparation techniques, and new applications.


The aim of the present study was to investigate whether CBSCs [(umbilical) cord blood stem cells] can be a new source of DCs (dendritic cells), which can generate more potent antigen-specific immune responses and anti-tumour effects. CBSCs and PBMCs (peripheral blood mononuclear cells) were collected, cultured and differentiated into DCs. Surface markers, secreting cytokines, antigen-presentation activity, antigen-specific cell-mediated immunity and cytotoxic killing effects induced by these two DC origins were evaluated and compared. CBSCs were expanded ~17-fold by ex vivo culture. The expression of surface markers in CBSC-derived DCs were higher than those in PBMC-derived DCs treated with LPS (lipopolysaccharide). The CBSC-derived DCs mainly secreted IL (interleukin)-6, IL-10 and TNF (tumour necrosis factor)-α, whereas PBMC-derived DCs mainly secreted IL-5 and IFN (interferon)-γ. The CBSC-derived DCs had better antigen-presentation abilities when stimulated with LPS or TNF-α, induced higher numbers of IFN-γ-secreting antigen-specific CD8+ T-cells, as assessed using an ELISpot (enzyme-linked immunosorbent spot) assay, and stimulated more potent antigen-specific CTL (cytotoxic T-cell) activities (P<0.01, one-way ANOVA). CBSC-derived DCs had quicker and greater ERK (extracellular-signal-regulated kinase) and Akt phosphorylation, and weaker p38 phosphorylation, than PBMC-derived DCs when stimulated with LPS. In conclusion, CBSC-derived DCs have the ability to induce stronger antigen-specific immunity and more potent anti-tumour effects and therefore could be a good source of DCs for use in DC-based cancer vaccines and immunotherapy.


The objective of this paper is to analyse what targets and criteria should be followed for electricity transmission investments which would be beneficial for Europe. The paper indicates that there is serious underinvestment in the European transmission network from the overall welfare point of view. The paper demonstrates that in transmission investments there is an important dimension of welfare distribution between the countries connected but also within the countries due to the change in the market outcome when an interconnector is built. The paper shows that it is possible to develop objective criteria for interconnector investments. Social welfare benefits from price arbitrage should be one criterion but several other criteria should be used as well including price convergence, security of supply and competition benefits. Flaws in market design, capacity calculation and capacity allocation need to be addressed to provide efficient signals for interconnector investments. This should include designing of optimal price zones for Europe.


Research with minors, especially for preventive purposes, e.g., suicide prevention, investigating risk or self-destructive behaviors such as deviance, drug abuse, or suicidal behavior, is ethically sensitive. We present a Delphi study exploring the ethical implications of the needs formulated by researchers in an international pre-conference who would benefit from ethics support and guidance in conducting Mental Health Research with minors. The resulting List of Ethical Issues (LEI) was submitted to a 2-rounds Delphi process via the Internet, including 34 multidisciplinary experts. In the first round, the experts reviewed the LEI and completed a questionnaire. Results from this round were analyzed and grouped in nine categories comprising 40 items. In the second round, the experts had to agree/disagree with the needs expressed in the LEI leading to a final list of 25 ethical issues considered relevant for Mental Health Research with minors such as: confidentiality of the sensitive data, competence for consenting alone and risk of harm and stigma related to the methodology used in research. It was shown that studies like SEYLE (Saving and Empowering Young Lives in Europe) trigger among researchers wishes to obtain specific recommendations helping to comply with standards for good practice in conducting research with minors.


Clearweld is a unique through transmission laser welding technique that allows for welding of two clear or two near-infrared transparent substrates. The process yields a nearly colorless weld when joining clear substrates. The resulting welds are also free from flash with minimal residual stresses. Applications of the Clearweld process can be found throughout the plastics welding industry including medical, automotive and electronics.An investigation was performed on the effect of welding parameters on joint strengths. The Clearweld process was utilized to weld thermoplastics in a butt joint configuration. Welds were produced at various laser powers, weld speeds, and clamp pressures. In addition, welds strengths were compared for samples generated by simple contour welding and quasi-simultaneous welding. Acrylic and polypropylene Clearwelded samples were examined.Clearweld is a unique through transmission laser welding technique that allows for welding of two clear or two near-infrared transparent substrates. The process yields a nearly colorless weld when joining clear substrates. The resulting welds are also free from flash with minimal residual stresses. Applications of the Clearweld process can be found throughout the plastics welding industry including medical, automotive and electronics.An investigation was performed on the effect of welding parameters on joint strengths. The Clearweld process was utilized to weld thermoplastics in a butt joint configuration. Welds were produced at various laser powers, weld speeds, and clamp pressures. In addition, welds strengths were compared for samples generated by simple contour welding and quasi-simultaneous welding. Acrylic and polypropylene Clearwelded samples were examined.


On the basis of identification of insurance company's core, innovation, knowledge management, leadership and organisational culture, this paper provides analysis of working results of one of the leading comapnies in Serbia - "DDOR Novi Sad", which in certain period of its business, on the basis of stated ways of behaviour has become a leader in life and non-life insurance. With synthesized illustration of business indicators, the conclusion is implied, which confirms hypothesis about need for creation of innovation model in insurance companies.


A study is done to develop fluvial particle monitoring system based on application of spectral imaging, image processing and artificial neural network (ANN). Research in this field has been initiated from 2004 at Kathmandu University. This research is applied to Bagmati river which is the principal river flowing and draining across Kathmandu Valley. Fluvial particles of Bagmati River were continuously monitored at 18 different strategic locations. These samples were continuously monitored in the Lab of Machine Vision at Kathmandu University in separate pre-monsoon, monsoon and post-monsoon seasons of 2008. A lab set up equipped with image processing and spectral imaging is developed to monitor the contents of fluvial particles. The set up resembles as a river path that contains upper reservoir and lower reservoir and a special transparent flow cell fabricated in between to monitor the particles instantaneously. An application is developed to characterize the particles that run on computer using Matrox imaging Library software and Mat lab 6.5 environments. The samples were taken in standard 125 millilitre jar. It characterizes organic and inorganic according to the spectral signature of the particles trained with Artificial Neural Network (ANN). Organic particles have different signature than that of inorganic and are most distinct at 630 and 670nm wavelength. Based on these characterizing properties samples from 18 strategic locations of Baghmati rivers were characterized. Reflectance property is used to characterize particles with Perceptron neural network and hardlim as a transfer function. The result depicted that the ratio of organic to inorganic is found to be 0.1111 at upstream of Sundarijal, 0.13889 at Guyeswori and 0.16 at Chobhar according to weight basis. Chobhar is the spot with high amount of both organic and in-organic contents. According to particles count the ratio of organic to inorganic is found to be 0.02362 at upstream of Sundarijal, 0.02955 at Guyeswori and 0.034576 at Chobhar. So this result shows that this system can be applied for water particles monitoring. This system can be used to find out the socio-economic activities at different points, suitable waste-water treatment plant area, irrigation and aquatic life preservation.


There are various parameters that affect tree height and may cause dwarfism. Our goal was to study the anatomical variations in the leaf and xylem structure in dwarf and normal trees of Copaifera langsdorffii and their correlation with physico-chemical properties of the soils. Trees from two spatially close but different vegetation types, transitional forest and rupestrian field, showed markedly different wood and leaf characteristics. Adult trees of C. langsdorffii show normal height (up to 25 m) in transitional forests while in the rupestrian field they show dwarfism (small trees up to 2.5 m tall). Physical soil characteristics (such as rocky crust, low water availability due to shallow soil) presumably limit root growth and affect the rate of photosynthesis, which consequently affect the extension growth of the plant. Compared to normal trees, C. langsdorffii dwarf trees are characterized by narrow vessels and a higher proportion of vessels in multiples, features of the water transport system/hydraulic structure known to prevent embolism, wider rays with a greater potential to store starch, and higher stomatal density and potential conductance index.


BACKGROUND
Congenital scoliosis due to a unilateral failure of vertebral segmentation usually has a poor prognosis. However, not all curves progress to the same degree or develop the same spinal deformity.

METHODS
The medical records and spine radiographs of 171 patients with a scoliosis due to unilateral unsegmented bar were reviewed retrospectively. The mean patient age at diagnosis was 9.3 years. Thirty-six patients had immediate surgery, 103 immature patients were followed untreated or before surgery for a mean duration of 3.6 years, twenty-eight patients were seen untreated at skeletal maturity, and four patients had no follow-up.

RESULTS
The unsegmented bar occurred at all levels; the mean extent was three vertebrae (range, two to eight vertebrae). Before the age of ten years, patients had a mean rate of scoliosis progression without treatment for all regions of the spine of 2° to 3° per year. By the age of ten years, seventy-three patients who had been seen untreated or prior to treatment had a mean scoliosis of 50° (range, 18° to 100°). After the age of ten years, these patients had an increase in the mean rate of scoliosis progression, but this rate varied per year depending on the affected region of the spine: 7° for the thoracolumbar curve, 5° for the midthoracic curve, and 4° for the upper thoracic curve. Spine surgery was performed on seventy-four patients who had a mean age of 12.2 years and a mean scoliosis of 78° for thoracolumbar curves, 66° for midthoracic curves, and 54° for upper thoracic curves. Of the patients with midthoracic congenital scoliosis, 24% developed a lower structural compensatory curve, which became larger and more deforming than the congenital curve, 22% had congenital rib fusions, and 16% had occult intraspinal anomalies.

CONCLUSIONS
Prognosis depends on growth imbalance at the site of the unsegmented bar as well as the location and extent of the bar, age at diagnosis, and spinal growth remaining.

LEVEL OF EVIDENCE
Prognostic Level II. See Instructions for Authors for a complete description of levels of evidence.


Introduction of CCI4 in doses of 0.1 and 0.2 ml/100 g to albino rats reduced the steroid production generated by adrenal sections. In 24 and 48 hours after poisoning with a small dose of CCI4 (0.1 ml/100 g) there could be seen an increased concentration of 11-oxycorticosteroids in the plasma. Morphological signs of a damage suffered by the gland were observed only in poisoning with a large dose of CCI4 (0.2 ml/100 g).


Post-assembly magnetization can significantly simplify the manufacturing of the rotor of permanent magnet (PM) electrical machines. The optimization of the post-assembly magnetizing device using finite element analysis (FEA) is time-consuming; therefore, a globally optimal solution aiming at achieving an adequate magnetizing level and minimal energy consumption is difficult to achieve. In this paper, a field–circuit coupling analysis (FCCA) model is proposed to optimize the auxiliary stator-type magnetizing device for interior permanent magnet synchronous machines (IPMSMs). A reasonable simplification of the highly saturated magnetic circuit is made based on FEA results so that the magnetic equivalent circuit (MEC) model can be established. On the other hand, the eddy currents in the PMs are equivalent to an eddy current short-circuit; thus, by converting the field calculation into a circuit calculation, the time cost can be reduced significantly, which greatly improves the speed of multi-objective optimization of the magnetizing device with multiple degrees of freedom. A V-type IPMSM is taken as a study case, and its post-assembly magnetizing device is optimized with the proposed method. FEA and experimental results show that the PMs are fully magnetized, while the required energy consumption is greatly reduced when compared with an existing magnetizing device.


Salivary Streptococcus mutans was quantified to detect possible age-, sex-, and group-dependent differences at the end of a 3-year field study assessing the value of partial substitution of sucrose with xylitol (X group) in comparison with systemic administration of fluoride (F group) and restorative treatment solely (C group). The material of this substudy consisted of 390 institutionalized children aged 9-14 years. S. mutans was determined through the spatula technique and grouped into categories 0, less than 10(5), 10(5)-10(6), and and greater than 10(6) CFU/ml saliva. Zero to less than 10(5) values included more than 80% of the subjects of the X group. The cross-sectional comparison between groups showed lower S. mutans values in the X group than in the F and C groups. These differences between groups were highly significant. S. mutans was not dependent on age or sex.


In the next two decades, hundreds of millions of people in emerging economies are projected to reach income levels at which they will be able to afford cars and air travel. As purchasing power increases worldwide, people will spend proportionately less on food and beverages and more on transportation. Higher spending on transportation, especially in China, India, and Sub-Saharan Africa, will increase pressures on the infrastructure in these economies and aggravate global climate change. Governments will need to respond to these challenges in a fiscally sustainable and environmentally responsible way.


Experimental results for the probability ratio R3 during three-photon ionization of Ca, Sr and Ba atoms in circularly and linearly polarized fields are presented for the principal quantum number range n=4-13. Unlike the alkali atoms, in most cases the measured R3 magnitudes are considerably less than the values estimated by the Klarsfield-Maquet factorial formula.


Surface seawater in the South Pacific Gyre (SPG) is one of the cleanest oceanic environments on earth, and the photosynthetic primary production is extremely low. Despite the ecological significance of the largest aquatic desert on our planet, microbial community composition in the ultra-oligotrophic seawater remain largely unknown. In this study, we collected surface seawater along a southern transect of the SPG during the Integrated Ocean Drilling Program (IODP) Expedition 329. Samples from four distinct sites (Sites U1368, U1369, U1370 and U1371) were examined, representing ∼5400 kilometers of transect line from the gyre heart to the edge area. Real-time PCR analysis showed 16S rRNA gene abundance in the gyre seawater, ranging from 5.96×105 to 2.55×106 copies ml−1 for Bacteria and 1.17×103 to 1.90×104 copies ml−1 for Archaea. The results obtained by statistic analyses of 16S rRNA gene clone libraries revealed the community composition in the southern SPG area: diversity richness estimators in the gyre center (Sites U1368 & U1369) are generally lower than those at sites in the gyre edge (Sites U1370 & U1371) and their community structures are clearly distinguishable. Phylogenetic analysis showed the predominance of Proteobacteria (especially Alphaproteobacteria) and Cyanobacteria in bacterial 16S rRNA gene clone libraries, whereas phylotypes of Betaproteobacteria were only detected in the central gyre. Archaeal 16S rRNA genes in the clone libraries were predominated by the sequences of Marine Group II within the Euryarchaeota, and the Crenarchaeota sequences were rarely detected, which is consistent with the real-time PCR data (only 9.9 to 22.1 copies ml−1). We also performed cultivation of heterotrophic microbes onboard, resulting in 18.9% of phylogenetically distinct bacterial isolates at least at the species level. Our results suggest that the distribution and diversity of microbial communities in the SPG surface seawater are closely related to the ultra-oligotrophic oceanographic features in the Pacific Ocean.


New dimensional reductions and exact solutions for a generalized nonlinear Schrodinger equation are presented. These are obtained using an extension of the direct method, originally developed by Clarkson and Kruskal (1989) to study dimensional reductions of Boussinesq equation, which involves no group theoretical techniques.


This project aim is to investigate the breakdown characteristics of unused transformer oil and olive oil under AC and DC voltage at different temperature rate. HVAC and HVDC breakdown tests are carried out alongside with the hemisphere electrode arrangements. The high voltage test is done in order to observe the performances of the oil samples to attain the highest breakdown AC and DC voltages. In addition, this project needs to be done to see if olive oil as one of the vegetable oil can be an alternative for the conventional transformer oil. Commonly used transformer oil is made from mineral oil and it is declining day by day as its use increases. So as a precaution studies are done with vegetable oils to replace the mineral oil-based transformer insulation fluid. In this study, each oil sample is tested at different temperature rate and has recorded different value of breakdown voltage from the experiment. The gap distance between electrodes is constant and oil samples are heated at different temperature ranges. More voltage is needed to breakdown at higher temperature rate. Both the unused transformer oil and olive oil have linearly increased AC and DC breakdown voltages when subjected to higher temperatures. However, it is found that the highest AC and DC breakdown voltages are recorded at the highest temperature range and when the insulating medium used is olive oil. Moreover, the obtained AC and DC voltages are then be used to study the electric field in FEMM software.


High-intensity focused ultrasound (HIFU) is used clinically to heat cells therapeutically or to destroy them through heat or cavitation. In homogeneous media, the highest wave amplitudes occur at a predictable focal region. However, HIFU is generally not used in the proximity of bones due to wave absorption and scattering. Ultrasound is passed through the skull in some clinical trials, but the complex geometry of the spine poses a greater targeting challenge and currently prohibits therapeutic ultrasound treatments near the vertebral column. This paper presents a comprehensive experimental study involving shadowgraphy and hydrophone measurements to determine the spatial distribution of pressure amplitudes from induced HIFU waves near vertebrae. First, a bone-like composite plate that is partially obstructing the induced waves is shown to break the conical HIFU form into two regions. Wave images are captured using pulsed laser shadowgraphy, and hydrophone measurements over the same region are compared to the shadowgraphy intensity plots to validate the procedure. Next, shadowgraphy is performed for an individual, clean, ex-vivo feline vertebra. The results indicate that shadowgraphy can be used to determine energy deposition patterns and to determine heating at a specific location. The latter is confirmed through additional temperature measurements. Overall, these laboratory experiments may help determine the efficacy of warming specific nerve cells within mammal vertebrae without causing damage to adjacent tissue.


Two antibiotic-susceptible and non-pathogenic Escherichia coli strains were administered to hospitalized premature infants in order to protect them from intestinal colonization by hospital-acquired antibiotic-resistant enteric organisms (EOs). Three groups of 16 premature newborns received respectively strain ECA, strain EMO and both strains simultaneously. A fourth group was used as a control. Resistant EOs became spontaneously established in the digestive tract of a majority of the unadministered children. Both ECA and EMO were able to colonize the digestive tract of a majority of the subjects, and reached high population numbers (greater than 10(7)/g) in the faeces. Both strains appeared as able to reduce significantly the establishment of antibiotic-resistant EOs. This effect was more prominent with EMO, which also impaired the implantation of ECA when both strains had been administered simultaneously. The use of such innocuous microorganisms could thus constitute an additional means of preventing nosocomial infections of intestinal origin.


Learning user interests from online social networks helps to better understand user behaviors and provides useful guidance to design user-centric applications. Apart from analyzing users' online content, it is also important to consider users' social connections in the social Web. Graph regularization methods have been widely used in various text mining tasks, which can leverage the graph structure information extracted from data. Previously, graph regularization methods operate under the cluster assumption that nearby nodes are more similar and nodes on the same structure (typically referred to as a cluster or a manifold) are likely to be similar. We argue that learning user interests from complex, sparse, and dynamic social networks should be based on the link structure assumption under which node similarities are evaluated based on the local link structures instead of explicit links between two nodes. We propose a regularization framework based on the relation bipartite graph, which can be constructed from any type of relations. Using Twitter as our case study, we evaluate our proposed framework from social networks built from retweet relations. Both quantitative and qualitative experiments show that our proposed method outperforms a few competitive baselines in learning user interests over a set of predefined topics. It also gives superior results compared to the baselines on retweet prediction and topical authority identification.


The Orleans-Lithotheque - an analogue rockstore for in situ missions Nicolas Bost, Frances Westall, Claire Ramboz, Axelle Hubert, Derek Pullan, Beda Hofmann, Elisabeth Verges, Michel Viso, Jorge Vago, Christelle Briois, Bruno Scaillet, Michel Tagger Instruments for in-situ missions to extraterrestrial bodies should ideally be cross calibrated using a common suite of relevant materials. Such multi-instrument calibration would enable a better comparison of instrument performances during the mission, as well as aid in the interpretation of the in-situ measurements. At the CNRS in Orleans, the Observatoire des Sciences de l'Univers de la region Centre is creating a collection of well-characterised rocks that will be available for testing and calibrating instruments to be flown on space missions. The characteristics of the collection's analogue materials will be described in an online database. In view of the upcoming 2018 ExoMars rover mission, we are concentrating initially on materials of direct relevance to Mars. The initial collection includes basalts (ultramafic, weathered, andesitic, hydrothermally-silicified); sediments (volcanic, biolaminated, banded iron formation); and minerals (silica, evaporites, clays, Fe oxides). This set of samples will be augmented with time. All samples will be characterised petrographically, petrologically, and geochemically using the types of analyses likely to be performed during an in-situ mission: hand specimen description, optical microscopy, mineralogical analysis (XRD, Raman and IR spectrometry), elemental analysis (EDX, microprobe, ICP) and organics analysis (Raman, pyr-GCMS).


Packet switched real time applications are receiving considerable interest in mobile networks, in particular the General Packet Radio Service (GPRS) is currently undergoing study into its evolution for the support of such applications. Telephony is expected to be one of the first real time applications such as voice over IP (VoIP) to be made available and support for existing telephony services is essential to provide users with a seamless transition from circuit to packet based networks. A great deal of mobile telephony services are currently provided by a combination of switched supplementary services and intelligent network (IN) based services. Operators who already provide such services would seek to maximise return on their current network investment by reusing the existing portfolio of IN services for VoIP. In order to achieve this, it is necessary for the Internet call control functions within say a GPRS to interwork with a service control point (SCP). This paper proposes an architecture to support CAMEL (Customised Application for Mobile Enhanced Logic) based operator specific services for VoIP users in a GSM/UMTS based mobile network environment to provide seamless service portability between 2G and 3G networks. The proposals put forward are suitable for the two popular Internet telephony call control protocols currently available, namely ITU-T's H.323 and IETF's Session Initiation Protocol (SIP). The work presented in this paper is an extension and generalisation of our contributions to a related feasibility study within the standardisation efforts of the 3/sup rd/ Generation Partnership Project core network group in collaboration with BTCellnet.


Based on biochemical and morphological studies, the significance of cholesterol in cholesteatoma and cholesterol granuloma is discussed. In cholesteatoma, cholesterol is synthesized through desmosterol and Δ7-cholestenol (lathosterol), possibly in the matrix. Cholesterol crystal might have educed from keratin layers or a cell-disintegrated layer adjacent to the matrix by a physicochemical rather than by a biochemical process. Production of cholesterol in the matrix may differ depending on the cell cycle. In cholesterol granuloma, cholesterol may be derived from blood with some other compositions such as albumin and cholestanol. although other sources cannot be denied. Crystallized cholesterol is treated by the surrounding tissue as a foreign body; this results in formation of granuloma. The Δ7-cholestenol is not involved in the biosynthesis of cholesterol in cholesterol granuloma.


JC virus (JCV), as an archetype, establishes a lifelong latent or persistent infection in many healthy individuals. In immunocompromised patients, prototype JCV with variable mutations in the non-coding control region (NCCR) causes progressive multifocal leukoencephalopathy (PML), a severe demyelinating disease. This study was conducted to create a database of NCCR sequences annotated with transcription factor binding sites (TFBSs) and statistically analyze the mutational pattern of the JCV NCCR. JCV NCCRs were extracted from >1000 sequences registered in GenBank, and TFBSs within each NCCR were identified by computer simulation, followed by examination of their prevalence, multiplicity, and location by statistical analyses. In the NCCRs of the prototype JCV, the limited types of TFBSs, which are mainly present in regions D through F of archetype JCV, were significantly reduced. By contrast, modeling count data revealed that several TFBSs located in regions C and E tended to overlap in the prototype NCCRs. Based on data from the BioGPS database, genes encoding transcription factors that bind to these TFBSs were expressed not only in the brain but also in the peripheral sites. The database and NCCR patterns obtained in this study could be a suitable platform for analyzing JCV mutations and pathogenicity.


Administration of a large dose (0.2 mg) of unlabeled specific anticarcinoembryonic antigen (anti-CEA) monoclonal antibody (MAB) to nude mice bearing LS174T human colon cancer xenografts significantly decreased normal liver uptake of 111In-labeled anti-CEA MAB (Indacea). Mice bearing tumors of approximately 1 g showed liver accumulation of indium-111 at 48 h following injection of 2 micrograms/10 microCi Indacea of 33.8 +/- 1.5% injected dose per gram (%ID/g) (N = 25). Treatment with 0.2 mg unlabeled anti-CEA MAB reduced this to 8.9 +/- 0.5% ID/g (N = 22; P less than 0.001). The dose of pretreatment was found to be critical. Increasing the amount of unlabeled MAB to 2.0 mg did not significantly improve the liver level of indium-111, but did compromise the tumor uptake of Indacea (15.9 +/- 1.3 versus 12.4 +/- 0.4% ID/g; P less than 0.05). Lowering the dose of pretreatment 10-fold resulted in increased (P less than 0.001) liver uptake of the label (26.5 +/- 2.8% ID/g). The unlabeled anti-CEA MAB treatment given as a single dose or fractionated over several days gave the same results. The decrease in liver uptake was the same for i.v. administration of the unlabeled MAB given 1 week prior to Indacea injection or mixed together with Indacea. With i.p. administration, simultaneous injection of the unlabeled MAB with Indacea was not as effective as pretreatment (20 min to 7 days) in decreasing the liver uptake of 111In (P less than 0.05). Epitope specificity and affinity were shown to be important considerations in the choice of MAB combinations used for pretreatment and imaging. Pretreatment with nonspecific MAB was ineffective in decreasing liver uptake of Indacea.


1. It makes little sense to talk about "visual aesthetics" as an isolated modality.
2. The genre determines the aesthetic qualities.
3. Aesthetic is not equal to good, pleasant, pretty, or nice.
4. Aesthetic experience is connected with intellectual deliberation as much as with immediate, "visceral" response.
5. We need holistic, interpretative approaches to dealing with aesthetics in interaction design.

These five beliefs are introduced and substantiated by means of examples and argumentation.


The CcrA beta-lactamase from Bacteroides fragilis TAL3636 was cloned into Escherichia coli and purified from inclusion bodies. This group 3 metalloenzyme hydrolyzed most beta-lactam antibiotics, including cephamycins and carbapenems. Following inhibition by chelators, enzyme activity was recovered with the cations Zn2+ and Co2+. Clavulanate and sulbactam were activators; tazobactam at 10 microM inactivated the enzyme.


Taxidermy is an old craft that requires a confrontation and even intimacy with dead animals; it is also a process that is not often seen or experienced by the general public in Western societies. I am an artist using the taxidermy process as the material for time-based work. My 2014 work cuddle involves swapping the insides and eyes of a dead rabbit and a teddy bear. One section of the work involves the display of these artefacts alongside video documentation. In this article the experience and somatic awareness of dead animal bodies serves as the cross section of ideas in posthumanism, phenomenology, and psychoanalysis. I provide an analysis of cuddle and examine how video documentation alongside dead animal bodies intersects with concepts of 'liveness' and presence in performance art. Using both Peggy Phelan and Phillip Auslander's concepts of 'liveness' and performance, I argue the potential of the olfactory in live performance, particularly the smell of dead animal bodies, and how our senses that have not yet been mediatised contribute to our experiences of live art. This analysis of cuddle combines these theories of 'liveness' with Aurel Kolnai's On Disgust, Julia Kristeva's concept of abjection, and Phelan and Herbert Blau's readings of mortality in the experience of an artwork as a live performance.


Character Education is an important element in developing affective to be good person especially as mahasantri, and it is significant to create the good value of clean and honest. The study aims to design video of 'clean and honest living characters' among mahasantri in Ma'had Al-Jami'ah IAIN Padangsidimpuan. Designing video for 'clean and honest living character' is resulted by research and development. This study use Focus Group Discussion as the instrument, beside observation and interview. Based on the instrument, it is found that content of video was designed into two videos of 'clean character' and 'honest character'. These two videos contains of four parts: part 1 is monolog about clean and health life character, part 2 is the slogan of clean and health living character, part 3 is the picture that show the contrast of positive and negative condition, and part 4 is short story about clean and health life character.
Keywords: Video design; character education; living characters'


A biliary stricture is an area of narrowing in the extrahepatic or intrahepatic biliary system. The majority of biliary strictures are caused by malignancies, particularly cholangiocarcinoma and pancreatic adenocarcinoma. Most malignant biliary strictures are unresectable at diagnosis. Treatment of these diseases historically required surgical procedures, however, the development of endoscopic techniques has provided alternative minimally invasive treatment options to improve patient quality of life and survival with unresectable disease. While endoscopic retrograde cholangiopancreatography with stent placement has been the cornerstone of biliary drainage for decades, cutting edge endoscopic developments, including radiofrequency ablation and endoscopic ultrasound-guided biliary drainage, offer new therapy options to patients that historically have a poor quality of life and a grim prognosis. In this review, we explore the endoscopic techniques that have contributed to revolutionary advancements in the endoscopic management of malignant biliary strictures.


Head and neck squamous cell carcinoma (HNSCC) is a high mortality disease. Extension of long-chain fatty acid family member 6 (ELOVL6) is a key enzyme involved in fat formation that catalyzes the elongation of saturated and monounsaturated fatty acids. Overexpression of ELOVL6 has been associated with obesity-related malignancies, including hepatocellular carcinoma, breast, colon, prostate, and pancreatic cancer. The following study investigated the role of ELOVL6 in HNSCC patients. Gene expression and clinicopathological analysis, enrichment analysis, and immune infiltration analysis were based on the Gene Expression Omnibus (GEO) and the Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA), with additional bioinformatics analyses. The statistical analysis was conducted in R, and TIMER was used to analyze the immune response of ELOVL6 expression in HNSCC. The expression of ELOVL6 was related to tumor grade. Survival analysis showed that patients with high expression of ELOVL6 had a poor prognosis. Moreover, the results of GSEA enrichment analysis showed that ELOVL6 affects the occurrence of HNSCC through fatty acid metabolism, biosynthesis of unsaturated fatty acids, and other pathways. Finally, ELOVL6 verified by the Human Protein Atlas (HPA) database were consistent with the mRNA levels in HNSCC samples. ELOVL6 is a new biomarker for HNSCC that may be used as a potential predictor of the prognosis of human HNSCC.


The kHz QPOs observed in a neutron star low mass X‐ray binary are likely to be produced in the innermost regions of accretion disk around the neutron star. The rotational dynamics of the inner disk can be characterized by the presence of either sub‐Keplerian or super‐Keplerian accretion flow depending on the relative fastness of the neutron spin as compared to the Keplerian frequency at the inner disk radius. Within the magnetosphere‐disk interaction model, the frequency difference between the two kHz QPOs observed in a given source can be estimated to be slightly higher than or nearly around the neutron star spin frequency if the neutron star is a slow rotator and less than the stellar spin frequency if the neutron star is a fast rotator.


We document the case of a young woman with bilateral nonluetic, interstitial keratitis, vestibuloauditory problems, and bilateral recurrent facial palsies, who had strongly positive serologic tests of Lyme borreliosis. To our knowledge, this is the first reported case of positive serologic tests for Borrelia burgdorferi in a patient with Cogan's syndrome.


Agenesis of corpus callosum (ACC) can have various development abnormalities spectrum. These include delay in milestones to complex neuropsychiatric manifestations. Following case report highlights the case of a young infant presenting with associated features including bilateral cleft lip and palate and hypertelorism. The kid was refused treatment at several centers owing to the central nervous system abnormality. This case reports highlight the ACC as a comorbid diagnosis in cleft lip and palate patient with hypertelorism perhaps owing to ignorance and fear of this apparently innocuous congenital malformation.


We report the first results of a survey on 74 narrow-line Seyfert 1 galaxies (NLS1s) carried out in 2015 with the Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (JVLA) at 5 GHz in A-configuration. So far, this is the largest survey aimed to image the radio continuum of NLS1s. We produced radio maps in order to compare the general properties of three different samples of objects: radio-quiet NLS1s (RQNLS1s), steep-spectrum radio-loud NLS1s (S-NLS1s), and flat-spectrum radio-loud NLS1s (F-NLS1s). We find that the three classes correspond to different radio morphologies, with F-NLS1s being more compact, and RQNLS1s often showing diffuse emission on kpc scales. We also find that F-NLS1s might be low-luminosity and possibly young blazars, and that S-NLS1s are part of the parent population of F-NLS1s. Dedicated studies to RQNLS1s are needed to fully understand their role in the unification pictures.


Background Bacterial vaginosis (BV) increases the risk of many sexually transmitted infections. The co-occurrence of persistent BV and high-risk HPV (HrHPV) increases the risk of developing cervical cancer. This study aims to investigate the co-occurrence of HrHPV and BV among young women in the US. Methods Stored vaginal swabs were acquired from a previously completed clinical trial. The kinds of bacteria present in the samples were identified by classifying 16S rRNA gene sequences in each sample using high-throughput pyrosequencing. HPV genotyping was performed using quantitative polymerase chain reaction using TaqMan probes in a customized plate (ThermoFisher Scientific; Waltham, Massachusetts). BV was classified using Nugent Scores of Gram Stain. Results Eighty reproductive age African American (AA) women were included in the analysis. The point prevalence of HrHPV was 48.1% (95%CI: 37–59%). The mean age of the participants was 21.4 years (SD: 2.11), 81.2% graduated high school. Prior antibiotic use was low (3.8%), and 75% were not treated for BV during their lifetime. Among those who had been treated previously for BV, most women were treated ≥ five times (60%). According to Nugent Scores, 70% had BV, 13.7% had intermediate flora and 16.3% were healthy. Among HrHPV positive women, 66.7% were infected with single HrHPV genotype, 33.3% with multiple HrHPV genotypes. Concurrent HrHPV and BV infection was found among 33.3% of the sample. However, there was no significant difference between the prevalence of HrHPV among women with and without BV. Conclusion Co-occurence of hrHPV and BV among this group of young African American women was relatively high. Considering that these conditions are very common among women worldwide, further research in this field is imperative. More studies are needed to accurately evaluate temporal sequence of acquisition of both conditions in any attempt to establish a causal relationship. Disclosure No significant relationships.


Purpose - – The global migration and movement of talent plays an important role in the economic growth and competitiveness of many nations. In coming decades, it is anticipated that there will be increased competition between countries to attract the best and brightest. The World Economic Forum (2011) has recommended using nation branding strategies to attract talent. In response to this recommendation, the purpose of this paper is to propose a strategic framework and terminology for branding nations to attract highly skilled workers. Based on a review of the literature, it recommends five strategic vision drivers that can help countries brand themselves in an appealing and compelling way to talented professionals. This paper also recommends the term "relocation branding" to describe the practice of branding nations, regions and cities to attract talent. Design/methodology/approach - – This paper examines the literature on nation branding and talent mobility to propose a conceptual framework of five vision drivers for branding destinations to attract talent. It also discusses how these vision drivers can be used in the context of an overall branding initiative and campaign. Findings - – This paper finds that the determinants of talent mobility are complex and overlapping. Highly skilled temporary and permanent migrants have a broad range of concerns and interests when they voluntarily choose a country to live and work in. This paper argues that, given these complexities, a more tailored and multidimensional understanding of talent mobility is necessary to effectively craft a branding strategy that will appeal to the highly skilled. A clear vision, demonstrating an understanding of the challenges of moving between countries, has to be integrated into the brand from the outset. Originality/value - – This paper is one of the only in-depth studies of nation branding for the purpose of attracting temporary and permanent skilled migrants. The value of this paper is significant as it provides a framework for strategically creating and positioning nation brands to attract highly skilled workers.


A technique has been developed whereby the average composition of a liver cell can be calculated from the results of a detailed chemical analysis of a sample of liver tissue. The number of cells in a unit weight of the sample is determined from its content of deoxynucleic acid with corrections for polyploidy and for the presence of binucleate cells. This technique has been employed to determine the amounts of the principal cellular constituents in the cells in the livers of normal male and female rats. The cells of the two sexes did not differ greatly in composition except that the female cell contained about three times as much iron as that of the male. The analysis of nuclear suspensions showed that copper was almost exclusively confined to the nucleus, whereas iron and zinc were almost entirely in the cytoplasm. The sizes of the cells and of their nuclei deduced from the determination of their composition were in good agreement with results of histological determinations of other workers.


From new neutron powder diffraction experiments on the chiral cubic ($P2{_1}3$) magnet manganese germanide MnGe, we analyse all of the possible crystal symmetry-allowed magnetic superstructures that are determined successfully from the data. The incommensurate propagation vectors $k$ of the magnetic structure are found to be aligned with the [100] cubic axes, and correspond to a magnetic periodicity of about 30 $\r{A}$ at 1.8 K. Several maximal crystallographic symmetry magnetic structures are found to fit the data equally well and are presented. These include topologically non-trivial magnetic hedgehog and"skyrmion'' structures in multi-$k$ cubic or orthorhombic 3+3 and orthorhombic 3+2 dimensional magnetic superspace groups respectively, with either potentially responsible for topological Hall effect. The presence of orthorhombic distortions in the space group $P2_12_12_1$ caused by the transition to the magnetically ordered state does not favour the cubic magnetic hedgehog structure, and leave both orthorhombic hedgehog and"skyrmion'' models as equal candidates for the magnetic structures. We also report on a new combined mechanochemical and solid-state chemical route to synthesise MnGe at ambient pressures and moderate temperatures, and compare with samples obtained by the traditional high pressure synthesis.


passed his lips, it was no longer his to control but became part of the surrounding atmosphere." To English ears such a judgment sounds extremely legalistic and out of touch with reality, and one trusts that such a case would be decided differently if tried here. Apparently, there are also certain States in the United States where the law is that merely by driving in that particular State, one is thereby consenting to have tests for intoxication taken. It is not yet known how this particular problem is to be dealt with in this country, if such tests become compulsory. There are many good things in this book, including a valuable section dealing with Psychiatry and Law, which includes a particularly interesting extract from the Alger Hiss case. Any British lawyer who is concerned with medico-legal problems can certainly read this book to advantage, and though parts of it contain matters that relate only to the United States, the majority of it is both helpful and instructive. EVAN STONE.


Utilizing a first-principles-based coarse-grained implicit solvent model, we have investigated the self-association of C(60) fullerenes that have been symmetrically modified with six grafted poly(ethylene oxide) (PEO) chains in aqueous solution. Despite the highly symmetric nature of the pair interactions between PEO-grafted fullerenes, their supramolecular assemblies are highly anisotropic and resemble the linear clusters formed in Stockmayer fluids. The dipole-like interaction between these symmetrically modified fullerenes results from the shielding of the C(60) fullerenes by PEO, favoring the addition of more PEO-grafted fullerenes to the linear clusters at the relatively unprotected ends. At low nanoparticle concentrations, self-association is dominated by the formation of stable dimers and trimers resulting from fullerene-fullerene contact and favorable PEO-fullerene interactions. With increasing nanoparticle concentration, larger clusters become increasingly probable. The molecular weight of the PEO tethers can be treated as a temperature-like analogue, with a reduction in average cluster size with increasing chain length due to increased steric repulsion, which is qualitatively similar to effects observed in Stockmayer fluids with increasing temperature. The role of PEO in supramolecular self-organization in PEO-modified C(60) fullerene/water solutions is complex, contributing not only to steric stabilization but also to favorable energetic interactions, nanoparticle shielding, and depletion-driven aggregation.


A cornerstone of active galactic nuclei (AGN) unification schemes is the presence of an optically and a geometrically thick dust torus. It provides the obscuration to explain the difference between type 1 and type 2 AGN. We investigate the influence of the dust distribution on the Eddington limit of the torus. For smooth dust distributions, the Eddingtion limit on the dust alone is five orders of magnitudes below the limit for electron scattering in a fully ionized plasma, while a clumpy dust torus has an Eddington limit slightly larger than the classical one. We study the behaviour of a clumpy torus at low and high AGN luminosities. For low luminosities of the order of ∼10 42 erg s −1 , the torus changes its characteristics and obscuration becomes insufficient. In the high-luminosity regime, the clumpy torus can show a behaviour which is consistent with the 'receding torus' picture. The derived luminosity-dependent fraction of type 2 objects agrees with recent observational results. Moreover, the luminosity-dependent covering factor in a clumpy torus may explain the presence of broad-line AGN with high column densities in X-rays.


Single stage and multi‐stage liquid hot water pretreatments of mixed hardwood pinchips were investigated at various severities (log R0 = 3.65–4.81) to assess the efficiencies of the pretreatments with respect to achieving high pentose sugar yields and improved enzymatic digestibility of pretreated cellulose. We investigate the effect of pretreatment parameters that is, temperature, and time, as expressed in the severity factor, on the recovery of sugars and hydrolyzability of pretreated cellulose. We find the severity factor, in its widely used form, is an incomplete measure for evaluating the pretreatment efficiencies and predicting overall sugar yields when pretreatment temperatures above 200°C are used. Corrections to the severity factor and its correlation to the measured pretreatment responses (% xylan solubilization, xylan recovery as fermentable sugars, cellulose enzymatic digestibility) indicate a greater influence of temperature on the pretreatment efficiencies than predicted by the commonly used severity factor. A low temperature, long residence time is preferred for hemicellulose dissolution during the pretreatment since the condition favors oligosaccharide and monomeric sugar formation over sugar degradation. On the contrary, high cellulose hydrolyzability is achieved with a high temperature (>200°C), high severity pretreatment when pretreatment is followed by enzyme hydrolysis. In multi‐stage pretreatment, the first low‐severity pretreatment is optimized for solubilizing fast‐hydrolyzing hemicellulose while minimizing formation of furans. The subsequent pretreatment is carried out at over 200°C to recover the difficult‐to‐hydrolyze hemicellulose fraction as well as to increase susceptibility of pretreated cellulose to enzymes. High recovery (>92%) of hemicellulose‐derived pentose sugars and enhanced enzymatic hydrolysis of pretreated cellulose (where >80% glucose yield results with 20 FPU = 32 mg protein/g glucan or 10–13 mg/g initial hardwood) are achieved by applying a multi‐stage pretreatment. This work shows how the severity equation may be used to obtain a single characteristic curve that correlate xylan solubilization and enzymatic cellulose hydrolysis as a function of severity at pretreatment temperatures up to 230°C. Biotechnol. Bioeng. 2014;111: 254–263. © 2013 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.


Herein, single-atom niobium-doped boron–carbon–nitrogen nanotubes (SANb-BCN) were synthesized and utilized to fabricate an electrochemical sensor for the detection of nitrobenzene (NB), an environmental pollutant. SANb-BCN were characterized through scanning transmission electron microscopy, scanning electron microscopy, transmission electron microscopy, X-ray diffraction analysis, and Raman spectroscopy. The Nb-BNC material modified on a glassy carbon electrode (GCE) showed an excellent electrochemical response behavior toward NB. The SANb-BCN-modified GCE (SANb-BCN/GCE) gave rise to a prominent NB reduction peak at −0.6 V, which was positively shifted by 120 mV from the NB reduction peak of the bare GCE. Furthermore, the NB peak current (55.74 μA) obtained using SANb-BCN/GCE was nearly 42-fold higher than that using the bare GCE (1.32 μA), indicating that SANb-BCN/GCE is a highly sensitive electrochemical sensor for NB. An ultralow limit of detection (0.70 μM, S/N = 3) was also achieved. Furthermore, the SANb-BCN/GCE sensor was found to possess favorable anti-interference ability during NB detection; thus, the presence of various organic and inorganic coexisting species, including Mg2+, Cr6+, Cu2+, K+, Ca2+, NH4+, Cd2+, urea, 1-bromo-4-nitrobenzene, 3-hydroxybenzoic, terephthalic acid, 1-iodo-4-nitrobenzene, and toluene, minimally affected the NB detection signal. Notably, the SANb-BNC sensor material exhibited high sensitivity and specificity toward detection of NB in environmental samples. Thus, the use of the proposed sensor will serve as an effective alternative method for the identification and treatment of pollutants.


The urban landscape undergoes constant transformations with the dynamics of the cities that (re) produce the spaces. Understanding this dynamic and its results emerges from the need to understand cities and their inhabitants, places more equitable and resilient to the transformations of society. In the spatial organization of cities, places with green predominance play an important role for their relationship between urban memory, quality of life departing from natural elements, the affection of the inhabitants with the place and the memorialist that is made through the relations between space and time. Thus, we understand that the quality of the urban landscape is measured by an arrangement of infrastructure elements, but also how people perceive the environment. In this study, the analysis of the perception of a public free space is measured by the identification of the elements that are understood by users as significant for the quality of the landscape of the Parque do Rio do Peixe (Videira - SC) and what experiences are felt along the existing paths in the park. The methodology of this analysis was structured according to a compendium of authors, but mainly suggested by Gehl and Svarre (2013), Lynch (1960) and Cullen (1983) and Camara (2018). At the end of the courses, unstructured interviews were conducted with approximately 150 volunteers. The results indicate preferences for areas with a predominance of natural elements, environments that provide safety sensations and elements of historical-cultural identification.


Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) are effective tools for graph representation learning. Most GNNs rely on a recursive neighborhood aggregation scheme, named message passing. In this paper, motivated by the success of retrieval-based models, we propose a non-parametric scheme called GraphRetrieval, in which similar training graphs associated with their ground-truth labels are retrieved to be jointly utilized with the input graph representation to complete various graph-based predictive tasks. In particular, we take a well-trained model with its parameters fixed and then we add an adapter based on self-attention with only a few trainable parameters per task to explicitly learn the interaction between an input graph and its retrieved similar graphs. Our experiments on 12 different datasets involving different tasks (classification and regression) show that GraphRetrieval is able to achieve substantial improvements on all twelve datasets compared to three strong GNN baseline models. Our work demonstrates that GraphRetrieval is a promising augmentation for message passing.


The Orphan Basin on the eastern edge of the Newfoundland continental margin formed as a Mesozoic rift basin prior to continental breakup associated with the opening of the North Atlantic. Few exploration wells exist in the basin, and until recently regional interpretations have been based on sparse seismic data coverage - because of this the structural evolution of the Orphan Basin has historically not been well understood. Key uncertainties include the timing and amount of rift-related extension, dominant extension directions, and the structural styles that accommodated progressive rift development in the basin.

Interpretation of newly acquired modern broadband seismic data and structural restoration of three regional, WNW-ESE oriented cross-sections across the Orphan Basin and Flemish Cap provide new insights into rift evolution and structural style in the area. Our results show that major extension in the basin occurred between 167 Ma and 135 Ma, with most extension occurring prior to 151 Ma. We show that extension after 135 Ma largely occurred east of Flemish Cap due to a shift in the locus of rifting from the Orphan Basin to east of Flemish Cap. We find no evidence for discrete rifting events in the Orphan Basin, as has been suggested by other authors.  Kinematic restoration and associated heave measurements for the Orphan Basin show that extension was both widespread and relatively evenly distributed across the basin from Middle-Late Jurassic to Early Cretaceous.

We provide evidence for more widespread deposition of Jurassic strata throughout the Orphan Basin than previously interpreted, and show that Jurassic deposition was controlled by the occurrence and displacement of crustal-scale extensional detachment faults.  Structure in the three regional cross sections is dominated by large-scale, shallowly dipping extensional detachment faults. These faults mainly dip to the northwest and control the geometry and position of extensional basins – grabens and half-grabens – which occur at a range of scales. Stacked detachment surfaces, hyperextension, and attenuation of the crust are observed in central and eastern parts of the Orphan Basin. Zones of extreme crustal attenuation (to ca. 3.7 km) are interpreted to be coincident with large-displacement (up to 60 km) low-angle detachments. Results from crustal area balancing suggest that up to 41% of extension is not recognized through structural seismic interpretation, which we attribute to subseismic-scale ductile and brittle deformation, and uncertainties in the identification of detachment surfaces or complex structural configurations (e.g., overprinting of early extensional deformation).

Rifting style in the central, northern, and eastern parts of the Orphan Basin is dominated by low-angle detachment faulting with maximum extension perpendicular to the incipient rift axis. In contrast, structural geometries in the southwestern part of the basin are suggestive of transtensional deformation, and interplay of normal and strike-slip faulting.  Results from map-based interpretation show that strike-slip faults within this transtensional zone are associated with displacement transfer between half-grabens of opposing polarity, rather than regional strike-slip displacement.  These structures are interpreted as contemporaneous and kinematically linked to displacement along low-angle detachment surfaces elsewhere, and are not attributed to distinct episodes of oblique extension.


The goal of the research activities presented in this thesis is the design of intelligent behaviours for a complex robotic system, which is composed of a swarm of autonomous units. Inspired by the organisational skills of social insects, we are particularly interested in the study of collective behaviours based on self-organisation.The problem of designing self-organising behaviours for a swarm of robots is tackled resorting to artificial evolution, which proceeds in a bottom-up direction by first defining the controllers at the individual level and then testing their effect at the collective level. In this way, it is possible to bypass the difficulties encountered in the decomposition of the global behaviour into individual ones, and the further encoding of the individual behaviours into the controllers' rules. In the experiments presented in this thesis, we show that this approach is viable, as it produces efficient individual controllers and robust self-organising behaviours. To the best of our knowledge, our experiments are the only example of evolved self-organising behaviours that are successfully tested on a physical robotic platform.Besides the engineering value, the evolution of self-organising behaviours for a swarm of robots also provides a mean for the understanding of those biological processes that were a fundamental source of inspiration in the first place. In this perspective, the experiments presented in this thesis can be considered an interesting instance of a synthetic approach to the study of collective intelligence and, more in general, of Cognitive Science.


Tidal water table fluctuations observed for 27 days in a gently sloped ocean beach are predicted well by numerical models based on the Boussinesq equation driven with the observed 10 min‐averaged shoreline (ocean‐beach intersection) motion. Diurnal and semidiurnal water table fluctuations are almost completely damped 100 m landward of the mean shoreline location on this fine‐grained sand beach, but fluctuations at spring‐neap periods (≈14 days) are attenuated less. Comparison of the observations with the predictions suggests that the asymmetries in the water table level time series measured in this study result from nonlinearity owing to the large (relative to the wavelength) horizontal shoreline excursions, rather than from nonlinearity owing to finite‐amplitude water table fluctuations. Cross‐shore variations of the aquifer depth are predicted to have a small effect on the landward decay rate of the water table fluctuations. The seepage face width is predicted accurately and depends on the nonplanar beach profile. In general, the development of a seepage face is predicted to have little effect on the water table level landward of the intertidal region.


Plasmonic gratings constitute a paradigmatic instance of the wide range of applications enabled by plasmonics. While subwavelength metal gratings find applications in optical biosensing and photovoltaics, atomically thin gratings achieved by periodically doping a graphene monolayer perform as metasurfaces for the control of terahertz radiation. In this paper we show how these two instances of plasmonic gratings inherit their spectral properties from an underlying slab with translational symmetry.We develop an analytical formalism to accurately derive the mode spectrum of the gratings that provides a great physical insight.