The combination of methotrexate with epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR) recombinant antibody, cetuximab, is currently being investigated in treatment of head and neck carcinoma. As methotrexate is cleared by renal excretion, we studied the effect of cetuximab on renal methotrexate handling. We used human conditionally immortalized proximal tubule epithelial cells overexpressing either organic anion transporter 1 or 3 (ciPTEC-OAT1/ciPTEC-OAT3) to examine OAT1 and OAT3, and the efflux pumps breast cancer resistance protein (BCRP), multidrug resistance protein 4 (MRP4), and P-glycoprotein (P-gp) in methotrexate handling upon EGF or cetuximab treatment. Protein kinase microarrays and knowledge-based pathway analysis were used to predict EGFR-mediated transporter regulation. Cytotoxic effects of methotrexate were evaluated using the dimethylthiazol bromide (MTT) viability assay. Methotrexate inhibited OAT-mediated fluorescein uptake and decreased efflux of Hoechst33342 and glutathione-methylfluorescein (GS-MF), which suggested involvement of OAT1/3, BCRP, and MRP4 in transepithelial transport, respectively. Cetuximab reversed the EGF-increased expression of OAT1 and BCRP as well as their membrane expressions and transport activities, while MRP4 and P-gp were increased. Pathway analysis predicted cetuximab-induced modulation of PKC and PI3K pathways downstream EGFR/ERBB2/PLCg. Pharmacological inhibition of ERK decreased expression of OAT1 and BCRP, while P-gp and MRP4 were increased. AKT inhibition reduced all transporters. Exposure to methotrexate for 24 h led to a decreased viability, an effect that was reversed by cetuximab. In conclusion, cetuximab downregulates OAT1 and BCRP while upregulating P-gp and MRP4 through an EGFR-mediated regulation of PI3K-AKT and MAPKK-ERK pathways. Consequently, cetuximab attenuates methotrexate-induced cytotoxicity, which opens possibilities for further research into nephroprotective comedication therapies.


The O-acetyl dieneol 1b, obtained from the Grignard addition of 2-(2-bromoethyl)-1,3-dioxolane to 2,4-hexadienal via 1a, and followed by an acetylation, was treated with maleic anhydride to give the crystalline Diels-Alder adduct 2b with good stereoselectivity. The acetal of 2b was selectively hydrolyzed to the acetoxy aldehyde 3b. This was treated with potassium hydride in tetrahydrofuran. A stereoselective intramolecular Aldol reaction resulted in the formation of the tricyclic lactone 4b. However, attempts to achieve an Aldol condensation under similar reaction conditions with the analogous aldehyde 3c, lacking the acetoxy group, failed, giving back the starting material 3c. On the other hand, the methoxy aldehyde 3d was cyclized to the tricyclic compound 4d.


Monkeypox virus (MPV) is a virulent human pathogen that has gained increased attention because of its potential use as a bioterrorism agent and inadvertent introduction into North America in 2003. The US outbreak also provided an important opportunity to study MPV-specific T cell immunity. Although MPV-specific CD4+ and CD8+ T cells could recognize vaccinia virus (VV)-infected monocytes and produce inflammatory cytokines such as IFNγ and TNFα, they were largely incapable of responding to autologous MPV-infected cells. Further analysis revealed that, unlike cowpox virus (CPV), MPV did not interfere with MHC expression or intracellular transport of MHC molecules. Instead, MPV-infected cells were capable of preventing T cell receptor (TcR)-mediated T cell activation in trans. The ability to trigger a state of nonresponsiveness represents a unique MHC-independent mechanism for blocking antiviral T cell activation and inflammatory cytokine production and is likely an important attribute involved with viral dissemination in the infected host.


Selwynite is a new alkali beryllium zirconium phosphate hydrate from a pegmatite vein in Devonian granite at Wycheproof, in northwestern Victoria, Australia. The mineral occurs as irregular infillings that consist of intergrowths of indistinct radiating crystals and as granular aggregates filling cavities up to 8 mm across in the quartz - orthoclase - albite - muscovite - schorl-bearing pegmatite. Accompanying minerals include two other Zr-bearing phosphates, kosnarite and the new species wycheproofite, as well as wardite, eosphorite, cyrilovite, leucophosphite, rockbridgeite, a kidwellite-like mineral, saleeite and montmorillonite. Selwynite is transparent deep purplish blue with a vitreous luster, but may weather to be pale lavender and translucent. The streak is pale lavender, the fracture, semiconchoidal, the cleavage, undeveloped, and the Mohs hardness, 4. The measured density is 2.94 g.cm (super -3) . Selwynite is uniaxial positive, omega 1.624, epsilon 1.636, and shows distinct pleochroism from medium to very pale bluish lavender. Average results of chemical analyses give Na 2 O 4.77, K 2 O 6.26, Rb 2 O 0.20, BeO 1.43, CaO 0.98, SrO 0.16, BaO 0.16, MgO 0.15, MnO 0.99, FeO 0.49, Cs 2 O 0.70, Al 2 O 3 1.04, Ce 2 O 3 0.03, ZrO 2 33.76, HfO 2 1.17, P2O5 40.90, SiO 2 0.49, F 0.37, H 2 O 5.4, less O = F 0.16, total 99.29 wt.%. The simplified formula is NaK(Be,Al)Zr 2 (PO 4 ) 4 .2H 2 O, based on (O + F) = 18. Selwynite is tetragonal, with unit-cell parameters refined from powder data: a 6.570(3), c 17.142(6) Aa, V 739.9(3) Aa 3 . For Z = 2, the calculated density for the empirical formula is 3.08 g.cm (super -3) . By analogy with gainesite the space group is I4 1 /amd. The strongest lines in the X-ray powder-diffraction pattern [d obs in Aa(I obs )(hkl)] are 6.161(100)(101), 4.291(25)(004), 3.286(50)(200), 3.039(30)(105), and 2.895(20)(211). Selwynite is related to gainesite by having the larger of the two Na sites in gainesite occupied by K, and to mccrillisite (Foord et al. 1994), which has that site occupied by Cs. All three minerals are considered to be hydrated, with between 2 and 4 water molecules per unit cell. The mineral name honors the late A. R. C. Selwyn, founding Director of the Geological Survey of Victoria.


The study investigates how natural amenities such as landscape and climate influence migration pattern in the continental US between 1990 to 2007 while controlling for employment, income and other factors using a panel data. Using the recent annual climate, land use and natural amenities data, along with the recent annual economic and Census migration data at the county level to investigate this relationship, we estimated a model for metropolitan and nonmetropolitan counties in the US using four approaches – fixed effects, random effects, Hausman-Taylor and Fixed Effects Vector Decomposition (FEVD). The results suggest significantly strong influence of natural amenities in both nonmetropolitan and metropolitan migration. Overall, policies designed to increase migration should take into account both economic and non-economic drivers that come to play in both rural and urban migration trends. INDEX WORDS: Natural amenities, Nonmetropolitan population migration, Metropolitan population migration, Panel data analysis, Fixed Effects Vector Decomposition Model MODELING THE INFLUENCE OF NATURAL AMENITIES ON RECENT TRENDS IN U.S. POPULATION MIGRATION


AIMS
We tested whether patrons of the night-time economy who had co-consumed energy drinks or illicit stimulants with alcohol had higher blood alcohol concentration (BAC) levels than patrons who had consumed only alcohol.

DESIGN
Street intercept surveys (n = 4227) were undertaken between 9 p.m. and 5 a.m. over a period of 7 months.

SETTING
Interviews were undertaken with patrons walking through entertainment precincts, queuing to enter venues or exiting venues in five Australian cities.

PARTICIPANTS
The response rate was 92.1%; more than half the study sample was male (60.2%) and the median age was 23 years (range 18-72).

MEASUREMENTS
Data were collected on demographics, length of drinking session, venue types visited, types and quantity of alcohol consumed and other substance use. A BAC reading was recorded and a subsample of participants was tested for other drug use.

FINDINGS
Compared with the total sample (0.068%), illicit stimulant consumers (0.080%; P = 0.004) and energy drink consumers (0.074%; P < 0.001) had a significantly higher median BAC reading, and were more likely to engage in pre-drinking (65.6, 82.1 and 77.6%, respectively, P < 0.001) and longer drinking sessions (4, 5 and 4.5 hours, respectively, P < 0.001). However, stimulant use was not associated independently with higher BAC in the final multivariable model (illicit stimulants P = 0.198; energy drinks P = 0.112). Interaction analyses showed that stimulant users had a higher BAC in the initial stages of the drinking session, but not after 4-6 hours.

CONCLUSIONS
While stimulant use does not predict BAC in and of itself, stimulants users are more likely to engage in prolonged sessions of heavy alcohol consumption and a range of risk-taking behaviours on a night out, which may explain higher levels of BAC among stimulants users, at least in the initial stages of the drinking session.


In site-directed spin labeling, a covalently attached nitroxide probe containing a chemically inert unpaired electron is utilized to obtain information on the local environment of the parent macromolecule. Studies presented here examine the feasibility of probing local DNA structural and dynamic features using a class of nitroxide probes that are linked to chemically substituted phosphorothioate positions at the DNA backbone. Two members of this family, designated as R5 and R5a, were attached to eight different sites of a dodecameric DNA duplex without severely perturbing the native B-form conformation. Measured X-band electron paramagnetic resonance (EPR) spectra, which report on nitroxide rotational motions, were found to vary depending on the location of the label (e.g., duplex center vs termini) and the surrounding DNA sequence. This indicates that R5 and R5a can provide information on the DNA local environment at the level of an individual nucleotide. As these probes can be attached to arbitrary nucleotides within a nucleic acid sequence, they may provide a means to "scan" a given DNA molecule in order to interrogate its local structural and dynamic features.


For the next-generation optical disk, electron beam mastering has been considered as a technique with high potential. Parameters of exposure and development processes, such as focus distance, beam current, linear velocity, and development time, have been discussed in our previous paper (2001). However, for electron beam mastering, electron backscattering is also an important problem. In this paper, we discussed how the proximity effect caused by backscattered electrons influences the exposure linewidth (FWHM) and the thickness of residual resist as track pitch decreases. We attacked this problem by raising beam voltage and changing the material of a substrate. According to experimental results, depositing a SiO/sub 2/ film or a Si/sub 3/N/sub 4/ film on a substrate can partially solve this problem.


The pH-dependence and reversibility of radium (Ra) and strontium (Sr) binding to a modified bauxite refinery residue (MBRR), and the effects of sample ageing, were studied in laboratory uptake/leaching experiments. Natural 226Ra and stable strontium (Srnat) were placed in contact with the MBRR for an 8-day loading period (equilibrium pH c. 8.5). Following the addition of exchange isotopes 228Ra and 85Sr, the samples were then leached in pH-dependent experiments, where the pH was decreased incrementally from 9 to 3 over 7 h. A further suite of samples was aged at 4°, 23° and 65°C for 6 months after the initial addition of 226Ra and Srnat and then studied in a similar set of pH-dependent exchange experiments. The relative concentrations of the Ra and Sr isotope pairs (226Ra/228Ra and Srnat/85Sr) provided insights into the adsorption strength, incorporation, reversibility and ageing effects. The Srnat data showed that the amount of bound Sr released from aged MBRR samples as the pH decreases is substantially lower than the unaged sample, showing that Sr has been incorporated in less accessible phases during the ageing period. It appears that the uptake of 228Ra by the higher-temperature aged samples is somewhat stronger than the unaged samples; however, Ra isotope exchange plots for aged and unaged samples are similar. Consequently, the stronger binding of 228Ra by the higher-temperature aged samples is probably driven by translocation to kinetically less-favourable surface sites rather than a significant incorporation of Ra within the mineral solids during ageing.


We study the physical properties of the ionized gas in local disks using the sample of 38 nearby ∼108.5 − 11.2M⊙ Star-Forming Main Sequence (SFMS) galaxies observed so far as part of the MUSE Atlas of Disks (MAD). Specifically, we use all strong emission lines in the MUSE wavelength range 4650-9300 A to investigate the resolved ionized gas properties on ∼ 100 pc scales. This spatial resolution enables us to disentangle H ii regions from the Diffuse Ionized Gas (DIG) in the computation of gas metallicities and Star Formation Rates (SFRs) of star forming regions. The gas metallicities generally decrease with radius. The metallicity of the H ii regions is on average ∼0.1 dex higher than that of the DIG, but the metallicity radial gradient in both components is similar. The mean metallicities within the inner galaxy cores correlate with the total stellar mass of the galaxies. On our < 100 pc scales, we find two correlations previously reported at kpc scales: a spatially resolved Mass-Metallicity Relation (RMZR) and a spatially resolved SFMS (RSFMS). We find no secondary dependency of the RMZR with the SFR density. We find that both resolved relations have a local origin, as they do not depend on the total stellar mass. The observational results of this paper are consistent with the inside-out scenario for the growth of galactic disks.


Water is a critical component in the functioning of the earth and of all living creatures. An important insight into the variable physical and biological properties of water has been provided by studies consistent with an external force termed KELEA (kinetic energy limiting electrostatic attraction) that weakens the intermolecular bonding of water molecules. Simple methods are described in this paper for producing and testing KELEA activated water. A summary is also provided of many major applications of KELEA activated water in health, agriculture and industry. While several of the proposed applications require more rigorous scientific documentation and further optimization, collectively they present the compelling opportunity for KELEA activated water to immediately transform medical, agricultural and industrial practices. A coordinated endeavor is proposed to better understand the science of KELEA and to develop simplified protocols for utilizing KELEA activated water and other fluids in the presently described and likely numerous additional applications. This ambitious undertaking envisions the cooperation among a range of specialized philanthropic organizations, working within different countries and with the strong support of national governments.


Light detection and ranging (LIDAR) atmospheric sensing is a major tool for remote monitoring of aerosol pollution and its propagation in the atmosphere. Combining LIDAR sensing with ground-based aerosol monitoring can form the basis of integrated air-quality characterization. When present, biological atmospheric contamination is transported by aerosol particles of different size known as bioaerosol, whose monitoring is now among the basic areas of atmospheric research, especially in densely-populated large urban regions, where many bio-aerosol-emitting sources exist. Thus, promptly identifying the bioaerosol sources, including their geographical coordinates, intensities, space-time distributions, etc., becomes a major task of a city monitoring system. This chapter argues in favor of integrating a LIDAR mapping schematic with in situ sampling and characterization of the bioaerosol in the urban area. The measurements, data processing, and decision-making aimed at preventing further atmospheric contamination should be performed in a near-real-time mode, which imposes certain demands on the typical LIDAR schematics, including long-range sensing as a critical parameter, especially over large areas (10 – 100 km2). In this chapter, we describe experiments using a LIDAR schematic allowing near-real-time long-distance measurements of urban bioaerosol combined with its ground-based sampling and physicochemical and biological studies.


Background Poorly performing doctors are a source of harm but do not commonly feature in discussions of patient safety. Few countries have national mechanisms to deal with these doctors; most opt for suspension and/or exclusion from clinical practice. This study reports on the 11-year experience of dealing with concerns about doctors' performance in the UK National Health Service (NHS). The aim of this study was to describe the frequency with which doctors were referred due to performance-related concerns, examine demographic and specialty differences, and identify the nature of the concerns prompting referral. Methods This observational study uses data collected by the National Clinical Assessment Service for each referral (n=6179 doctors) over an 11-year period (April 2001–March 2012) in England to examine the rate at which concerns about doctors' performance occur, understand differences in rates between practitioner groups, and changes over time. Findings The annual referral rate was five per 1000 doctors (95% CI 4.6 to 5.4). Doctors whose first medical qualification was gained outside the UK were more than twice as likely to be referred as UK-qualified doctors; male doctors were more than twice as likely to be referred as women doctors; and doctors in the late stages of their career were nearly six times as likely to be referred as early career doctors. Discussion The UK holds a consistently collected national dataset on performance concerns about doctors. This allows risk groups to be identified so that preventive action and early intervention can be targeted most effectively to reduce harm to patients. A feature of past handling of poor clinical performance has been late presentation and a lack of thematic study of causation.


The EPSRC pilot project Meeting the Design Challenges of nanoCMOS Electronics (nanoCMOS) is focused upon delivering a production level e-Infrastructure to meet the challenges facing the semiconductor industry in dealing with the next generation of 'atomic-scale' transistor devices. This scale means that previous assumptions on the uniformity of transistor devices in electronics circuit and systems design are no longer valid, and the industry as a whole must deal with variability throughout the design process. Infrastructures to tackle this problem must provide seamless access to very large HPC resources for computationally expensive simulation of statistic ensembles of microscopically varying physical devices, and manage the many hundreds of thousands of files and meta-data associated with these simulations. A key challenge in undertaking this is in protecting the intellectual property associated with the data, simulations and design process as a whole. In this paper we present the nanoCMOS infrastructure and outline an evaluation undertaken on the Storage Resource Broker (SRB) and the Andrew File System (AFS) considering in particular the extent that they meet the performance and security requirements of the nanoCMOS domain. We also describe how metadata management is supported and linked to simulations and results in a scalable and secure manner.


The downscaling of the feature size and pitches of the semi-conductor device requires the improvement of device characteristics and high yield continuously. In lithography process, RET techniques such as immersion and polarization including strong PSM mask have enabled this improvement of printability and downscaling of device. It is true that optical lithography is approaching its limit. So other lithographic technique such as EUV is needed but the application is not yet available. In this point of view, the realization of lithography friendly layout enables good printability and stable process. And its scope is being enlarged and applied in most semi-conductor devices. Therefore, in order to realize precise and effective lithography friendly layout, we need full chip data feedback of design issue, OPC error and aberration and process variables. In this paper, we report the results of data feedback using new DFM verification tool. This tool enables full chip inspection through E-beam scan method with fast and accurate output. And these data can be classified with each item for correction and stability check through die to database inspection. Especially in gate process, total CD distributions in full chip can be displayed and analyzed for each target with simple method. At first we obtain accuracy data for each target and CD uniformity from hundreds of thousands of gate pattern. And second we detect a delicate OPC error by modeling accuracy and duty difference. It is difficult to get from only measurement of thousands pattern. Finally we investigated specific pattern and area for electrical characteristic analysis in full chip. These results should be considered and reflected on design stage.


The mid-long term electric load forecasting provide essential data for the grid planning, it is helpful to optimize the planning of the power system. According to such features in mid-long term forecasting as small samples, poor information, uncertainty and nonlinearity, we can use the verhulst model in the grey system to do the forecasting. But in thinking of the differences of the sampling and the variations of the original sequence, the verhulst can't do the forecasting exactly. So, through the method of doing equal-interval quantization and reforming the background value to the original sequence, we have established the improved verhulst model. The improved model is applied to the electric load prediction of one district and the accuracy of the min-long term load forecasting can be enhanced by our model.


To prevent negative outcomes for diabetes patients, developing self-management skills is imperative. This study aimed to examine the association between management of chronic disease (MCD), which mainly involves educating patients about their chronic diseases for obtaining self-management skills and hospitalization due to diabetes among type 2 diabetes patients in Korea. Korean National Health Insurance Service National Sample Cohort data from 2002 to 2013 were used. A total of 54,031 type 2 diabetes patients were included in the study. If patients received the MCD within 1 year from the onset of diabetes, we categorized them as "MCD received patients" We reclassified these groups into five groups: "non-receiving", "1–3 times", "4–6 times", "7–9 times" and "10–12 times" The dependent variable of this study was hospitalization due to diabetes. Cox proportional hazard regression was used. Of the patients, 86.2% (n = 46,571) did not received the MCD within the 1 year from the onset of diabetes. The number of MCDs received increased and the hazard ratio (HR) for hospitalization due to diabetes decreased; particularly, patients who received MCD 10–12 times per annum showed the lowest HR for hospitalization due to diabetes compared to patients in the MCD non-received group (1–3 times per annum: HR: 0.81, p = 0.0001; 4–6 times per annum: HR: 0.82, p = 0.0248; 7–9 times per annum: HR: 0.75, p = 0.0054; 10–12 times per annum: HR: 0.61, p < 0.0001). Considering the importance of raising self-managing diabetes skills, the findings can aid in determining the outcomes of the MCD program.


Solution of the problem of optimal school scheduling is very important to make the work of comprehensive schools more effective. Here the sequence of teaching subjects, regarded as tools, can be changed. One needs to reduce the sum of gaps ("empty" hours) in the teacher schedules. There should be no gaps for students. Different classes are considered as different tasks. The classrooms, including the computer and physics rooms and studies, are the limited resources. The most difficult example is scheduling of profiled school. Here eleventh and twelfth grade students are choosing several subjects from the list of available ones. This means that each student works by his own schedule. We search for the most convenient feasible schedule. The inconveniences are evaluated by penalty points. The purpose of the study is to analyze several commercial scheduling programs which are prevalent in Lithuania at the moment and to compare them with existing timetable version of Optimization Department of Lithuanian Institute of Mathematics and Informatics (IMI) from optimal scheduling point of view. Therefore our research object is to study and compare the quality of optimization algorithms of these programs. One of the tasks is to identify existing commercial scheduling programs which might be right for Lithuanian profiled comprehensive schools. Another task is to perform the tentative comparison of scheduling programs MIMOSA, aSc Timetables and IMI timetable version from the point of view of quality of optimal scheduling. We used three stages for study of these programs: 1) scheduling without any confines - it's allowable to consecutively add two equal subjects, the ultimate number of lessons per day is 10 and teachers are working without day offs; 2) reduction of ultimate number of lessons to 9 lessons per day; 3) optimal scheduling of real Vilnius secondary school.


OBJECTIVE
The role of nanoscale/submicron morphological features in the process of osseointegration is largely unknown. This study reports the creation of a unique submicrofeatured titanium surface by a combination of anodic oxidation and sandblasting and determines how the addition of this submicrofeature to a microroughened surface affects the early-stage process of osseointegration.

MATERIALS AND METHODS
Nonmicroroughened implants were prepared by machining Ti-6Al-4V alloy in a cylindrical form (1 mm diameter and 2 mm long). Microroughened implants were prepared by sandblasting machined implants, while submicrofeatured implants were created by anodic oxidation of the sandblasted implants. Implants were placed into rat femurs and subjected to biomechanical, interfacial, and histological analyses at 1 and 2 weeks post-implantation (n = 6).

RESULTS
The submicrotopography was characterized by 50-300 nm nodules and pits in addition to other submicron-level irregularities formed entirely within the sandblast-created microstructures. The biomechanical strength of osseointegration increased continuously from week 1 to 2 for the submicrofeatured implants but not for the microroughened implants. A significant increase in bone-implant contact and bone volume, as well as a reduction in soft tissue intervention, were commonly found for the microroughened surface and the submicrofeatured surface compared with the nonmicroroughened surface. However, there were no differences in these parameters between the microroughened surface and the submicrofeatured surface. An extensive area of bone tissue at the submicrofeatured implant interface was retained intact after biomechanical shear testing, while the microroughened implant-tissue interface showed a gap along the entire axis of the implant, leading to clear separation of the tissue during the shear procedure.

CONCLUSIONS
This study demonstrates that a submicrofeatured titanium surface created by a combination of sandblasting and anodic oxidation enhances the strength of early-stage osseointegration, primarily because of the increased resistance of peri-implant bone tissue against external force rather than modulation of bone morphogenesis.


The long-term outcome for middle-class offenders after conviction is an under-researched area in criminology. This present study considers 317 offenders—with a follow-up of at least 35 years—who are seeking white-collar employment after conviction. On the basis of their previous criminal history, five clusters of offenders can be identified using latent class analysis (LCA): low-rate whitecollar, low-rate general, medium-rate acquisitive specialists, medium/high-rate generalists and high-rate generalists. Of the total series, 40 per cent were reconvicted of any standard-list offence, 24 per cent were reconvicted of a white-collar offence and 8 per cent were reconvicted of a sex or violence offence. The study helps to support the notion that middle-class persons are very much part of 'the crime problem'.


This paper proposes an extended and unified impedance-based fault location method which accounts for the inherent characteristics of distribution systems (unbalanced operation, presence of intermediate loads, laterals, and time-varying load profile). The technique is developed using phase-component analysis, and uses only local voltages and currents as input data. The time-varying load profile of distributions systems is considered by using an iterative procedure to update the load data used in the fault location algorithm. The procedure is based on matching both magnitude and angle of the prefault load impedance at the local terminal and the load impedance estimated through a power-flow analysis. In determining the equivalent power flow paths of branched distribution feeders a power-flow-based analysis is performed, enabling the technique to be applied in large distribution systems. Aiming to extend the application of the proposed method to underground in addition to overhead distribution systems, a set of generalized fault location equations which consider the shunt admittance of the lines was used. Test results show the accuracy and robustness of the fault location algorithm to different fault types, distances and resistances, considering system's load profile variations up to ± 50%.


Plants minimize fitness losses through grazing by three fundamental strategies: tolerance, avoidance and escape. Annual species have been traditionally assumed to escape grazing through their short life cycle and seed dormancy; however, their grazing response strategies remain almost unexplored. How traits and their coordination affect species' grazing responses, and whether the generalized grazing model, which posits convergent filtering by grazing and drought, is applicable to this ecologically and economically important species group thus remain unclear. We used a trait‐based approach to evaluate grazing response strategies of winter annuals from the Middle East. Across 23 species, we examined the coordination of 16 traits hypothesized to be relevant for grazing responses, and linked them to species' fecundity responses, as proxy for fitness responses, to simulated grazing in controlled conditions, to species' abundance responses to grazing in the field and to species' distribution along a large‐scale rainfall gradient. Winter annuals exhibited both grazing escape and to a lesser extent tolerance indicated by (a) independent coordination of escape and tolerance traits, and (b) maintenance of higher fecundity in species with more pronounced escape or tolerance traits under simulated grazing. In the natural habitat, species with a more pronounced escape but not tolerance strategy maintained higher abundance under grazing in dry habitats, indicating convergent favouring of escape by both grazing and drought. However, this finding at the local scale was not mirrored by a strategy shift along a large‐scale rainfall gradient. Synthesis. The convergent favouring of escape traits by grazing and drought in annuals is consistent with the generalized grazing model. This model, which has been developed for perennials based on the avoidance strategy, can thus be extended to annuals based on escape, a finding that should facilitate projecting consequences of global change in drylands dominated by annuals.


Thousands of children's books are published each year-some are outstanding, while others are not. This book makes it easier for you to find the best in children's nonfiction books, and it offers concrete, classroom-tested ideas for presenting them to students in irresistible ways. Booktalks for more than 350 nonfiction titles (appropriate for elementary and middle school students) are organized according to topics popular with young readers-Great Disasters, Unsolved Mysteries, Fascinating People, Science, and Fun Experiments to Do. In addition, there are tips on booktalking, an outline for a booktalk program, and a bibliography that can be used for collection development. Appropriate grade levels for each book are cited. Library Media Specialists will find this guide essential. The thematic approach helps teachers search for titles that correlate to curriculum areas or specific units of study. Parents can use the book with their children as a reading selection tool. Anyone who works with young children will find this book an invaluable resource.


The research examines agriculture value chain finance as it has been applied in the Komati Downstream Development Project. It seeks to assess whether the Komati Downstream Development Project has addressed the challenges of access to finance, markets and support services and enabled smallholder farmers in the project area to operate commercially. The Swaziland National Development Strategy of 1999 committed to increase investment in agriculture. The Komati Downstream Development Project was in line with this strategy. However, for smallholder farmers to commercialise they needed to first overcome the constraints they faced, which included access to finance, access to markets and access to both business and technical support. This research will contribute to future developments and decisions involving the increase of financial flows and investment to the agriculture sector in Swaziland and in other developing countries. This is an empirical research study primarily using a qualitative method to answer the research question. The research design included a review of documentary evidence from a desktop study to collect secondary data and a field study through face-to-face interviews to collect primary data. The primary data was gathered through semi-structured interviews. The organisations interviewed included ten farmers' associations, the outgrower development department, Swaziland Industrial Development Company and Swaziland Water and Agriculture Development Enterprise. Content analysis was used to analyse the results identifying similar themes and patterns from the interview transcripts. Secondary data on the performance of the KDDP farmers with respect to production volumes and quality of produce was collected and analysed to answer the question whether the smallholder farmers had moved from operating at a subsistence level to a commercial one. The research findings show that the agriculture value chain finance approach as applied in KDDP has improved access to markets, access to finance and access to support and services, and, in the process, the smallholder farmers are now operating commercially. The farmers are able to engage with bigger markets for both inputs and outputs in large-scale sugarcane farming. However, notable findings were made with respect to access to finance and support. Most of the farmers reported the need for continued support by Swaziland Water and Agriculture Development Enterprise and training despite the need to wean them off. Regarding access to finance, farmers reported improved access with more financial institutions selling financial products to the farmers and wanting to finance them. However, none of the farmers' associations interviewed had accessed additional funding from any of the financial institutions following the initial funding they had acquired. The farmers' associations have instead turned to internal sources of funds. Though these challenges do not change the conclusion, they are of concern and need to be addressed.


A review of dynamic and adaptive techniques for power management of on-chip interconnects, under emerging design considerations, is presented. The progress of IC technology has introduced novel methods, architectures and new challenges for power-aware design exploration. An examination of state-of-the-art power management techniques enables feasible and efficient design of future NoC platforms. This review first analyzes the new challenges, architectures and technologies, including PVT (process, voltage, temperature) variations, rapidly increasing leakage power, multiple on-chip PDN (power delivery network) as well as other architectures, which bring new considerations in low-power design exploration. A wide selection of dynamic power-saving techniques for on-chip interconnects are examined, classified into several categories including run-time datapath configuration, supply configuration and adaptive encoding. The effects and feasibility of these methods, especially their potentials in future technology, are judiciously analyzed. An outlook on generic power management paradigms in next-generation NoCs concludes the review.


- The retention of chemical structure and functional groups during pulsed plasma polymerization was used for producing adhesion-promoting plasma polymer layers with high concentrations of exclusively one kind of functional groups, such as OH, NH2, or COOH. The maximum content of functional groups was 31 OH using allyl alcohol, 18 NH2 using allylamine, or 24 COOH per 100 C atoms using acrylic acid. To vary the density of functional groups, chemical co-polymerization with ethylene as 'chain-extending' co-monomer, or butadiene as 'chemical crosslinker' was initiated in the pulsed plasma. The composition of these co-polymers was investigated by XPS and IR spectroscopy. The concentrations of functional groups were measured by derivatizing with fluorine-containing reagents and using XPS. A set of plasma parameters was found to be a good compromise between a high number of functional groups and complete insolubility in water, ethanol or THF,which is needed for further chemical processing. Here, these monotype-functionalized surfaces were used in metal-polymer systems as adhesion-promoting interlayers to examine the influence of type and density of functional groups on adhesion. As expected, COOH- and OH-group-terminated interlayers showed maximum peel strengths to evaporated aluminium layers. The adhesion increased linearly with the number of OH groups to a maximum at about 27 OH per 100 C atoms. Higher concentrations of OH groups did not increase the peel strength further.


This project feasibility study dealt with the establishment of a business, the Ciaris Company, which would manufacture Malunggay-Tofu Burger Patty. Partnership is the ideal form of organization for this business. The initial investment amounting to Php380, 811.22, would be equally shared by the partners and cover the fixed assets, working capital, pre-operating costs, and contingencies. The business is feasible as evidenced by the computed net income of Php75,501.22 and 20% rate of return (ROI) on its first year of operation, and a two years and 240 days payback period.


Author(s): Gatchell, Melissa Sue | Advisor(s): Ponce, Ninez A | Abstract: Background: Cancer is the second leading cause of death in the United States, accounting for 22% of all deaths among women. Despite the importance of the Pap test in preventing and detecting cervical cancer, screening rates among poor women remain low. The pathways linking poverty with lower Pap test use remain unclear. The screening disparity for this low-cost test suggests that poor women may face other transaction costs, opportunity costs and barriers in accessing Pap tests that are not faced by women living above poverty. Data/Methods: The data set merged the 2005 California Health Interview Survey, 2000 Census, and safety net clinic data. I examine elements of the patient-provider interaction (racial/ethnic discrimination) and healthcare system (distance to the nearest safety net clinic) as possible mediators between individual-level poverty and Pap tests. I then examine the role of individual-level poverty in moderating the association between discrimination and Pap test use and safety net distance and Pap test use. I also examine whether the neighborhood-level poverty moderates the association between individual-level poverty and Pap tests, discrimination and Pap tests, and distance and Pap tests. The sample included women, 18-64, with a physician visit in the previous 5 years and no history of cervical cancer. Mediation was tested using Generalized Estimating Equations (GEE) and a weighted product-of-coefficients test. Moderation was tested using GEE and including interaction terms. Results: Poor women were significantly less likely to report a timely Pap test, had significantly higher odds of reporting discrimination, and were more likely to reside closer to a safety net clinic. Discrimination did not predict Pap tests and was not a mediator between individual-level poverty and Pap tests. Safety net distance predicted Pap tests and was a mediator between individual-level poverty and Pap tests. Neither individual-level poverty nor neighborhood-level poverty modified the proposed relationships with Pap test use. Conclusion: Racial/ethnic discrimination did not explain disparities in Pap tests. Proximity to a safety net clinic was shown to be protective against disparities and may play a role in addressing disparities in screening. Individual-level poverty and neighborhood-level poverty did not influence the role of proposed mediators in predicting Pap tests.


Contract consistency is important in ensuring the legal validity of the contract. In many scenarios, a contract is written by filling the blanks in a precompiled form. Due to carelessness, two blanks that should be filled with the same (or different) content may be incorrectly filled with different (or same) content. This will result in the issue of contract inconsistencies, which may severely impair the legal validity of the contract. Traditional methods to address this issue mainly rely on manual contract review, which is labor-intensive and costly. In this work, we formulate a novel Contract Inconsistency Checking (CIC) problem, and design an end-to-end framework, called Pair-wise Blank Resolution (PBR), to solve the CIC problem with high accuracy. Our PBR model contains a novel BlankCoder to address the challenge of modeling meaningless blanks. BlankCoder adopts a two-stage attention mechanism that adequately associates a meaningless blank with its relevant descriptions while avoiding the incorporation of irrelevant context words. Experiments conducted on real-world datasets show the promising performance of our method with a balanced accuracy of 94.05% and an F1 score of 90.90% in the CIC problem.


Earlier we reported that the urinary excretion of 6-sulfatoxymelatonin (aMT6s) displayed seasonal rhythms in laboratory rats and hypothesized that the horizontal intensity H of the geomagnetic field may act as seasonal zeitgeber. To test this, long-term experiments were performed with female Sprague-Dawley rats. In experiment I (n=12: 1997-1999) nocturnal aMT6s displayed a winter-summer increase by 30% and a rhythm with a phase-length of 24 months peaking in July 1998. In experiment II (n=12; 1999-2000) the winter-summer increase amounted to 40%. The estimated rhythm had a phase-length of 18 months with a peak in September 2000. Compared to experiment I both the rhythm-adjusted mean (MESOR, + 28%) and amplitude (+68%) were elevated. In experiment III (n=30; 2003-2004) the winter-summer increment was just 20%. A circannual rhythm with a peak in April/May was found. The MESOR was 13% higher than in experiment I but the amplitude was depleted ( -14%). In experiment IV (n=15; 2005-2006) a slight winter-summer increase (+15%) was found and a low-amplitude rhythm of 24 months phase-length peaking in June 2006. The MESOR was similar to experiment I but the amplitude was depressed (-36%). These results demonstrate that female rats within two years of age show elevated aMT6s during summer/spring which supports our initial hypothesis. The apparent inter-experimental amplitude variation indicates the involvement of additional variables. Based on our initial hypothesis, we postulate an involvement of the solar cycle affecting H leading to year to year variations and present supportive analyses.


Distribution of Rift Valley fever virus (RVFV) was studied in the mosquito Culex pipiens. Mosquitoes were dissected on days 1-7 after an infectious bloodmeal, and RVFV plaque assays were performed on the legs, posterior midgut, ovaries, salivary glands, thoracic ganglia, and remaining organs and tissues (remnants). On days 7-12 and 14 following an infectious bloodmeal, mosquitoes were tested for their ability to transmit virus and then dissected. Dissemination (systemic infection) rates averaged 22% on days 1-14 and transmission rates 33% on days 7-14. There were no significant differences in the viral titers of midgut samples among the nondisseminated infected (virus limited to alimentary canal), disseminated infected nontransmitting, and transmitting groups of mosquitoes. The sequence of infection of the organs and tissues studied appeared to be as follows: midgut, hemolymph, remnants: salivary glands, ovaries, and thoracic ganglia. Some individuals were found to have disseminated infections as early as 12 hr following an infectious bloodmeal. Trauma, simulated by vigorous shaking immediately following the viremic bloodmeal, did not affect either infection or dissemination rates.


A successful water injection management is a key to increase or stabilize oil production and to maximize oil recovery from a mature field. This paper describes an approach to draw maximum benefit through existing set up of a water injection in a mature offshore carbonate field of India. Water injection initiated after the six years of oil production and field is under water flood since last 28 years. The field witnessed favorable water flood condition and almost negligible aquifer support. During its long production period most of the producers had been sideracked from one to three times to target better saturation areas which has led to uneven subsurface water distribution. The field has also suffered less voidage compensation for quite some time.
 To understand and mitigate the problem, a small pilot area within a field has been selected for implementing a good surveillance and monitoring program with pattern injection and possible intervention strategy. It was decided that based on the success of this pilot, the concept would be developed for implementation in step by step manner for entire field. The importance of multidisciplinary team has been recognized and detailed SWOT analysis was done for effective implementation of plan. Initially pilot area comprised of 15 oil producers and 4 water injectors. Conversion of one producer to water injector and restoration of water injection in 3 injectors were done as per plan and optimized injection rate (in this case maximum 3000 bbl per day) per injector were implemented. Peripheral pattern for pilot area with 5 injectors and 5 spot inverted patterns from rest 3 injectors were decided.
 After one year of the implementation a thorough performance analysis of the pilot has been carried out which indicates the overall improvement of liquid and oil production rates along with reduction in GOR and decreasing trend of oil decline rates of producers.
 The pilot approach has certainly helped to understand the Reservoir conformance in short duration of time. Encouraging results of this methodology guides to extent and implement this approach in other parts of field to cover the entire field in phased manner.


The design, simulation studies, and experimental verification of an electrically small, low-profile, broadside-radiating Huygens circularly polarized (HCP) antenna are reported. To realize its unique circular polarization cardioid-shaped radiation characteristics in a compact structure, two pairs of the metamaterial-inspired near-field resonant parasitic elements, the Egyptian axe dipole (EAD) and the capacitively loaded loop (CLL), are integrated into a crossed-dipole configuration. The EAD (CLL) elements act as the orthogonal electric dipole (magnetic dipole) radiators. Balanced broadside-radiated electric and magnetic field amplitudes with the requisite 90° phase difference between them are realized by exciting these two pairs of electric and magnetic dipoles with a specially designed, unbalanced crossed-dipole structure. The electrically small (ka = 0.73) design operates at 1575 MHz. It is low profile  $0.04\lambda _{\mathbf {0}}$ , and its entire volume is only  $0.0018\lambda _{\mathbf {0}}^{\mathbf {3}}$ . A prototype of this optimized HCP antenna system was fabricated, assembled, and tested. The measured results are in good agreement with their simulated values. They demonstrate that the prototype HCP antenna resonates at 1584 MHz with a 0.6 dB axial ratio, and produces the predicted Huygens cardioid-shaped radiation patterns. The measured peak realized LHCP gain was 2.7 dBic, and the associated front-to-back ratio was 17.7 dB.


Although prostate cancer is one of the most commonly encountered malignancies in clinical practice, it is very unusual for prostate cancer to metastasize to the small bowel. Our search of the literature found no such cases published from 1966 to the present. We report the case of a 69-year-old man who presented for evaluation of anasarca and anorexia. He had a history of prostate cancer diagnosed 9 years before and had undergone a radical prostatectomy with subsequent radiotherapy for positive tumor margins. He developed anasarca 2 years before presentation to us. His serum albumin ranged between 1.5 and 2.5 g/dL. Upper endoscopy was performed for possible protein-losing enteropathy and the appearance of gastric and duodenal mucosa was found to be normal. Random small bowel biopsies revealed submucosal infiltrating adenocarcinoma with positive prostate-specific antigen stains consistent with the diagnosis of prostate cancer metastatic to the small bowel. This is a rare presentation of metastatic prostate cancer. Even though prostate cancer is the most commonly diagnosed cancer in American men, antemortem diagnosis of small bowel metastasis has not been reported. In patients with unexplained anasarca, especially with a history of malignancy, an upper endoscopy with small bowel biopsy may be useful in establishing the diagnosis.


The objective of the article was to assess methodologies published and applied in calculating mortality attributable to smoking. A review of the literature was made for the period 1990 to 2006, in the electronic databases MEDLINE and LILACS. A total of 186 studies were found, which measured mortality based on calculating the smoking-attributable risk. Of these, a total of 41 were selected. The studies that were carried out in the United States and Canada presented a more standard methodology and reported smoking attributable mortality to be 18%-23%, with male mortality being 25%-29% and female mortality 14%-17%. The variations can be attributed to methodological differences and to different estimates of the main tobacco-related illnesses.


This article is about the city as home for people living in diaspora. We develop two key areas of debate. First, in contrast to research that explores diasporic homes in relation to domestic homemaking and/or the nation as home or 'homeland', we consider the city as home in diaspora. Second, building on research on transnational urbanism, translocality and the importance of the 'city scale' in migration studies, we argue that the city is a distinctive location of diasporic dwelling, belonging and attachment. Drawing on interviews with Anglo–Indian and Chinese Calcuttans who live in London and Toronto, we develop the idea of 'diaspora cities' to explore the importance of the city as home rather than the nation as 'homeland' for many people living in diaspora. This leads to an understanding of the importance of migration and diaspora within cities of departure as well as resettlement, and contributes a distinctively diasporic focus to broader work on comparative urbanism.


The nature of thick-slice scanning causes severe inter-slice discontinuities of 3D medical images, and the vanilla 2D/3D convolutional neural networks (CNNs) fail to represent sparse inter-slice information and dense intra-slice information in a balanced way, leading to severe underfitting to inter-slice features (for vanilla 2D CNNs) and overfitting to noise from long-range slices (for vanilla 3D CNNs). In this work, a novel mesh network (MNet) is proposed to balance the spatial representation inter axes via learning. 1) Our MNet latently fuses plenty of representation processes by embedding multi-dimensional convolutions deeply into basic modules, making the selections of representation processes flexible, thus balancing representation for sparse inter-slice information and dense intra-slice information adaptively. 2) Our MNet latently fuses multi-dimensional features inside each basic module, simultaneously taking the advantages of 2D (high segmentation accuracy of the easily recognized regions in 2D view) and 3D (high smoothness of 3D organ contour) representations, thus obtaining more accurate modeling for target regions. Comprehensive experiments are performed on four public datasets (CT\&MR), the results consistently demonstrate the proposed MNet outperforms the other methods. The code and datasets are available at: https://github.com/zfdong-code/MNet


[1] Arctic sea ice plays a key role in the climate system, by acting as the interface between a warm ocean and a cold atmosphere. Establishing the true pattern of recent behavior of the sea ice in this region is critical to simulating the role of sea ice in future climate. Recently released operational ice charts from the U.S. National Ice Center provide insight into the late twentieth century behavior of Northern Hemisphere sea ice, providing more reliable ice concentrations during summer and freeze-up than those available from the passive microwave record. The major winter and summer modes of ice concentration variability observed from empirical orthogonal function analysis covering the period 1972–1994 are shown to indicate, respectively, the 1-year lagged response of the sea ice to the North Atlantic Oscillation and the winter preconditioning of summer sea ice coverage in the eastern Arctic by the North Atlantic Oscillation. Feedback to the atmosphere is suggested in each case by zero-lag cyclone frequency relationships to these two sea ice modes of variability.


If business cycles are caused mostly by changes in productivity, rather than by monetary and financial disturbances, what role do monetary and fiscal policies play? In this article, Satyajit Chatterjee discusses the possibility that countercyclical monetary and fiscal policies have played an important role in reducing the severity of business cycles since World War II but that additional countercyclical policies that try to offset movements in productivity aren't likely to be beneficial


Acne is a chronic inflammatory disease of the skin that occurs when bacteria abnormally grow in hair follicles. The most common treatment is antibiotics, but they are limited due to antibiotic resistance. The purpose of this study was to identify the active ingredients of the antimicrobial effects of red ginseng (Panax ginseng C.A. Meyer), compare it to existing antibacterial substances, and determine its potential efficacy as a natural drug product. The hydrophobic fraction in red ginseng ethanol extract (RGEF) showed the same or better antimicrobial activity against Propionibacterium acnes than benzoyl peroxide or azelaic acid. In addition, the antimicrobial component derived from red ginseng selectively showed a high antimicrobial effect on P. acnes. Nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopic analysis showed that the active antimicrobial substance in this fraction was panaxynol and panaxydol. Twenty subjects who had acne symptoms were treated with cream containing 3 mg/g of RGEF for 4 weeks. It was found that oxidized sebum contents and redness of the skin were reduced, and symptoms of the early to middle stage of acne were effectively improved. This study showed that red ginseng extract containing panaxynol and panaxydol can effectively control the symptoms of acne.


Objective: In the last years researchers' attention has been given to the immunomodulatory properties of multipotent mesenchymal stromal cells. The question of effectiveness of the stem cell therapy with MSCs from elderly donors is worth studying. Our aim was to compare the potency of bone marrow MSCs in aging.
Methods: BM-MSCs were obtained using the standard methods. The following methods were applied: immunophenotyping, colony-forming unit fibroblast assay, granulocyte/macrophage colony-forming cells assay in the semi-agar cultures, directed differentiation, colorimetric method, MTT assay.
Results: The stromal progenitor cells increase in their number indicating age-associated elevated ability of the BM-MSCs to proliferation. The BM-MSCs have shown their ability for osteogenic and adipogenic differentiation along with age-associated abnormalities in the osteogenic differentiation. The BM-MSCs expressed immunomodulatory effect in dose-dependent manner regardless the donor age.
Conclusions:

The obtained culture cells derived from adult and old mice according to phenotypic profile and capacity for directed multilineage differentiation meet minimum criteria for the MSCs.
Age-dependent differences of directed osteogenic BM-MSC differentiation have been shown.
BM MSCs regardless of mouse age expressed a dosedependent inhibitory effect on the mitogen-induced proliferation of splenocytes.


The Dane-zaa maintain a close connection to the human and non-human persons with whom they live through what I have called "narrative technology" and Amber Ridington describes as "oral curation." An oral history passed on from generation to generation describes people and events that took place over a period of more than 200 years in considerable detail.  The paper reviews literature relating to First Nations oral history in Canadian case law and presents several Dane-zaa narratives about pre-contact times and the early fur trade.  I argue that Dane-zaa narrators should be viewed as oral historians in their own right and that their testimony meets the test of credibility and reliability set out by Chief Justice Beverly McLachlin.


Squirreltail (Elymus elymoides [Raf]
Swezey) can grow in cheatgrass (Bromus tectorum L.) stands, and has reduced
the biomass production of cheatgrass in its immediate vicinity. A field experiment
was conducted to determine: 1) if competition for nitrogen resources occurs
between seedlings of squirreltail and seedlings of cheatgrass, under low,
medium, and high nitrogen levels, and; 2) if competition for nitrogen resources
in the seedling stage is a mechanism that allows squirreltail to establish in
cheatgrass stands. Five accessions of squirreltail were each seeded with a
single accession of cheatgrass in a cultivated field near Ephraim, Utah in the
fall of 1995 and again in 1996. A completely randomized strip-plot design with
3 replications was used including the 5 joint seedings as well as pure seedings
of each accession of both species. Three nitrogen levels representing high,
medium (control), and low were applied. The study was replicated over 2 years
in different areas of the same field. Harvests of above-ground biomass of
squirreltail and cheatgrass within each treatment were conducted in July of
1996 and 1997. Using biomass production as a measure of efficient nitrogen use,
cheatgrass competed for and used nitrogen resources more efficiently than
squirreltail when nitrogen was not limiting. All squirreltail accessions were
able to compete for and use nitrogen more efficiently than cheatgrass when
there was low availability of nitrogen. Some accessions of squirreltail
competed for nitrogen resources more efficiently than others both in the
control and at the reduced nitrogen level. White Rocks and Sublette
squirreltail accessions were the best competitors with cheatgrass at the low
nitrogen level reducing the cheatgrasss biomass by as much as 75% and 67%
respectively. An intermediate competitor with cheatgrass was the Gunnison
accession. The Washakie and Pueblo accessions were poor competitors with
cheatgrass at low nitrogen levels.


The US Viking missions (1975-1976) failed to discover any biological activity on the surface of Mars. Yet, life may exist in the planet lithosphere which was found to contain a substantial amount of water. Martian interior can also provide microbial cryptolife with sources of carbon (CO, CO2, CH4) and energy (reduced elements and compounds, e.g. H2, CO, H2S, NH4+, CH4, Fe3+). Microorganisms identical to the Earth's anaerobic methanogens, sulfate reducers, acetogens, denitrifiers etc. are the most probable Martian aborigines. Well-balanced continuous functioning of the Martian cryptobiosphere implies closure of biochemical carbon, sulfur and nitrogen cycles which cannot be reached but with participation of organotrophic and anaerobic hydrolytic and zymotic organisms, ammonifiers and denitrifiers. Considering the low intensity of biological and chemical processes in the absence of surface hydrosphere, low-power atmosphere and cryptobiosphere closure on Mars, and slow global energy matter cycles, evolution of the presumable Martian cryptolife should also go at a slack pace and directions and forms of the evolution of living substance can have little in common with those on Earth. Comprehensive investigations of the Martian biota will employ a great variety of geochemical, radi- and stable isotope, microbiological, enzymatic and molecular biology methods.


Periodontitis is an inflammatory disease that causes damages to periodontium and alveolar bone. Overactivation and formation of osteoclasts can cause bone destruction, which contributes to periodontitis development. Receptor activator of nuclear factor κB ligand (RANKL)-mediated NF-κB signaling plays an essential role in osteoclasts differentiation. We aimed to study the effects of NIK-SMI1, an NF-κB-inducing kinase (NIK) inhibitor, on the osteoclastogenesis in vitro and periodontitis progression in vivo. A ligature-induced mice model of periodontitis was incorporated to test the potential therapeutic effect of NIK-SMI1 on periodontitis. The target protein and mRNA expression levels were determined by Western blot assay and real-time PCR assay, respectively. We found that the administration of NIK-SMI1 strongly inhibited the RANKL-stimulated non-canonical NF-κB signaling as demonstrated by decreased nuclear p52 expression and activity. Blocking NIK activity also resulted in reduced osteoclasts specific genes expression and enhanced IFN-β expression. NIK-SMI1 treatment resulted in attenuated periodontitis progression and pro-inflammatory cytokines expression in vivo. Our study suggested that NIK-SMI1 exerts beneficial effects on the mitigation of osteoclastogenesis in vitro and periodontitis progression in vivo. Application of NIK-SMI1 may serve as a potential therapeutic approach for periodontitis.


The pure spiritual experience affected by the spirit of Islam and its purity appeared in the poet Qurashi hermit, modernist, jurist, and preacher, and he was Urwa bin Uthaina. Madinah, he was in good contact with the Umayyads and the supporters of Abdullah bin Al-Zubayr, he chose not to play with politics or play with it, because he had a clear commitment to poetry, especially what was from it in spinning. He did not only say poetry, but he was making melodies and dissolving them for others to sing, and at the same time he was composing and arranging the sung poetry, as far as we know that the singer Ibn Aisha asked him for verses in jest. Where do you say? There are a number of singers who praised his poetry and sang a lot about it, and in the Book of Songs there are many voices of his poetry, and some hadith books devoted pages to him according to what is known from the science of wound and modification by Ibn Hatim and the great history of Imam al-Tabari and acceleration of benefit by Ibn Hajar alAsqalani and among the most famous who narrated from him Abd Allah bin Omar and Obaid Allah bin Omar (may God be pleased with them) as narrated by Imam Malik (may God have mercy on him). Here he presents us with a flirtatious text that is unique in its kind and pious in its performance, and begins with a clear mobilization, because it obeys the sea and the rhyme, and the poem starting is an equation of a true love experience that he embraced and tortured with, either he lived it, or from a figment of the imagination, or he was tormented with this love because there was no matter His heart is something, but he is on his piety and piety. He lived in a society that could not comprehend his position on this love, and for this he had to deal with what he calls (covering), but that his beloved herself fears for him, so she addresses him by doing the matter (hiding) that he loved in his own way. Our poet has loved a pure and chaste love, rather he has risen above the lover when he has not made himself known and who he loves. Love for him - as it is said - is a test and a test from God for people to take themselves with the obedience of those they love, and to be an entrance to a greater love that is the love of God Almighty, and perhaps this confirms it History is ours, and it does not stop us with the one who loves a name or attributes, for it is a state that was expressed as "seeing light for light in light."


This essay considers an 1845 English translation by "A Friend to Ireland" of a French essay on Irish politics by the Italian nationalist Count Cavour, Considerations on the Present State and Future Prospects of Ireland. Irish aspirations to national sovereignty are, in Considerations, insistently distinguished from, and represented as insignificant in relation to, a universal history in which the British Empire leads the globe towards modernity and liberalism on terms that register the ways in which universal history and geopolitics sanction opposing views of global relations and the foundations of sovereignty.


Synopsis Measurements of Middle Jurassic tridactyl dinosaur tracks from the Bathonian, Lealt Shale, Valtos Sandstone, Duntulm and Kilmaluag formations of the Isle of Skye, UK, are compared to the same measurements taken for dinosaur footprints from the Bajocian, Gypsum Spring and the Bathonian, Sundance Formation of the Bighorn Basin, Wyoming, USA. Principal component analysis of the data suggests that the smaller footprints from the Valtos Sandstone and Kilmaluag formations are indistinguishable from the footprints of the Sundance Formation. The single footprint from the Lealt Shale Formation is similar to the larger footprints from the Valtos Sandstone Formation. The footprints from the Duntulm and Gypsum Springs formations form distinct groupings from all other footprints. Four different groupings of dinosaur footprints can be recognized from the principal component analysis that may represent at least four different types of dinosaur.


Due to increasing financial pressure on maintaining and improving pharmacy services, there is a need for productivity data and time distribution among different activities for pharmacy practice residents and their faculty preceptors (pharmacotherapists). This study measured the clinical productivity of 13 residents and 25 pharmacotherapists for a 14-day period. The study identified the average time (minutes) and frequency spent each day on categories of activities, which included direct patient care, chart use, rounds, professional encounter, teaching, research, and administration. Results showed that the productivity profiles for residents and pharmacotherapists were comparable. Findings were utilized to defend the educational programs for the department and as a baseline for periodic monitoring of the productivity of these programs.


A heterocyclic derivative of 3-(N-di-n-butylaminomethyl) quinazolin-4-ones was synthesized and its tribological behavior as an ashless additve without phosphorus and sulphur in liquid paraffin was evaluated using a four-ball tester. On the basis of the experimental results, the novel additive has been found to be quite effective as a potential additive in liquid paraffin. The nature of the film on the rubbed surface was investigated by scanning electron microscopy (SEM) and X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS).


In this paper, we describe the results of a project in which undergraduate engineering students developed and deployed a water purification system for use in rural Africa. The location of the project is a small village of 392 people in rural Ghana named Famanye, which is approximately a 40-minute drive from Accra, the capital. The only water sources in the village are brackish water from a pump and a very small, terribly polluted runoff-fed pond. The water from the pump is too salty for consumption, and the residents are forced to use the water from the pond, since the nearest fresh water source is two kilometers away. To address this problem, a team of students in the multidisciplinary engineering program on the Polytechnic campus of Arizona State University are developing a water purification system based on a unique, patented heat recovery scheme in which heat transferred from the clean water condensation process is used to evaporate the contaminated water. The result is that the needed heat input to the system is greatly reduced; the system is simplified; and the units can be reliably deployed in undeveloped rural areas. The system has been designed to be low cost, easy to produce and to require little maintenance, enabling the village to manufacture and sell the units to neighboring villages. The project described in this paper is part of a larger interdisciplinary initiative at ASU known as GlobalResolve, in which sustainable entrepreneurial models for economic progress in developing countries are pursued. This leads to unique design constraints on projects that result in very rewarding experiences for the students involved.


Abstract Opening-mode fractures in clinker and opal-CT chert spheroids form by growth and coalescence of pores, and are associated with extensive textural and compositional changes in the host material. Extensive inelastic deformation outside the immediate vicinity of fracture tips characterizes these fracture processes as ductile. Fracture formation in clinker is concurrent with high-temperature combustion alteration of diatomaceous mudstone. Fracture formation in chert spheroids is associated with the opal-CT to quartz transition in the same host material during early marine diagenesis. In both cases, growth of elongate pores is attributed to the combined effects of diffusive-fracture growth and flow by solution-precipitation creep. Pore growth and coalescence occur preferentially ahead of fracture tips along two directions oblique to the mean macroscopic fracture direction. This growth process, referred to as side-lobe damage, is interpreted to reflect the shear-stress dependence of pore growth by solution-precipitation creep. The tendency for oblique fracture growth is suppressed by global stress and strain-boundary conditions forcing the fracture along a characteristic zig-zag propagation path that is macroscopically perpendicular to the loading direction. These examples of ductile fracture demonstrate that macroscopic fracture formation is not uniquely associated with damage processes by microfracture at low-temperature 'brittle' subsurface conditions. Instead, fracture is a deformation process that can occur due to various inelastic-deformation mechanisms under diverse crustal environments, which include high-temperature conditions.


A series of 4-phenoxybutyric acid derivatives attached to a tricyclic skeleton were prepared and evaluated as 5alpha-reductase inhibitors. Structure activity relationships for these compounds in terms of rat epididymis (type 2) 5alpha-reductase inhibitory activities reveal that 1) the substitution pattern at the 11-position of dibenz[b,e]oxepin influenced potency, 2) higher lipophilicity of the tricyclic skeleton improved potency, whereas the existence of a basic nitrogen atom in this skeleton was detrimental to potency, and 3) isobutyl substitution at the 8 positon of the azepine skeleton was tolerated. Among the tricyclic compounds studied, 4-[3-[5-benzyl-8-(2-methyl)propyl-10,11-dihydrodibenz[b,f]azepine- 2-carboxamido]phenoxy]butyric acid (26) was the most potent inhibitor of rat type 2 5alpha-reductase at 0.1 microM.


Chapter seven analyzes some of the most relevant future scenarios, regarding population, energy resources, public health, inequality, democracy on a national scale and forms of social power. On the population, evidences are advanced which cast doubt on the comforting idea that its trend will first become stationary and then decrease. On public health, the connotations of the Covid-19 pandemic are compared with those of the major ecological problems. On inequality, the emphasis is placed on that resulting from competition for the goods of status and power. On democracy, the tension between the national context, in which this political regime has expressed itself in our era, and global processes is discussed. Finally, the coexistence of various forms of social power and the ways in which they combine with each other is examined.


This paper analyzes how the cold drawing process influences the fatigue behaviour of eutectoid steel, with special emphasis on the role of microstructural changes induced during such a manufacturing process. Fatigue cracks are transcollonial and exhibit a preference for fracturing pearlitic lamellae, with non-uniform crack opening displacement values, micro-discontinuities, branchings, bifurcations and frequent local deflections that create microstructural roughness. The net fatigue surface increases with cold drawing due to the higher angle of crack deflections.


Ocean mass variability on timescales of months to decades is still insufficiently understood. On these timescales, large-scale ocean bottom pressure (OBP) anomalies are associated both with wind induced variability as well as baroclinic processes, i.e. related to vertical shear of ocean density. The GRACE mission has been instrumental in quantifying such mass fluctuations, yet its lifetime is limited. The broader importance of non-tidal ocean mass variability for oceanography but also geodesy (i.e. for understanding the time-varying geoid, shape of the Earth's crust, centre of figure, Earth rotation) is obvious. Deep ocean processes can only be understood properly when not only sea surface height and upper ocean steric expansion are measured but deep ocean pressure anomalies are accounted for in addition. Apart from GRACE, the SWARM constellation may provide information on the lowest degrees of the time-variable gravity field of the Earth and therefore of large-scale oceanic processes. Here we introduce the project CONTIM, which is run in the framework of the German Special Priority Programme "Dynamic Earth" (SPP1788). In CONTIM we propose to combine expertise on precise satellite orbit determination, gravity field and mass modelling, and physical oceanography to retrieve, analyse and verify consistent time series of ocean mass variations from a set of low-flying Earth orbiters including GRACE, but extending the GRACE time series. This information is used to advance our understanding of oceanic movement, ocean warming and sea level rise. CONTIM will thus synergistically address three areas: (1) the methodology of precisely determining LEO orbits, applied here to the SWARM constellation. (2) a new method of retrieving large-scale time-varying gravity (TVG) and mass change associated with oceanic (and cryospheric and hydrological) processes from results of (1), based on forward modelling. (3) physical modelling of ocean mass variations, both for improved forward modelling in (2) and for integration with satellite-geodetic retrieved ocean mass, and aiding in the determination of a final consistent modelling of sea level rise, ocean warming and oceanic mass budget. In this contribution, we will give an overview of the objectives of the project and provide some first results. We will highlight the technical challenges associated with the computation of kinematic SWARM orbits. Furthermore, different scenarios for time-variable gravity field retrieval are tested and evaluated, and the CHAMP data are used to test the methods over a longer period. To better understand and parameterize the ocean mass signals, we will discuss output from a high resolution version of the ocean model FESOM forced with tides, surface winds and atmospheric pressure.


We reveal an explicit strategy to design the magneto-optic response of a magneto-plasmonic crystal by correlating near- and far-fields effects. We use photoemission electron microscopy to map the spatial distribution of the electric near-field on a nanopatterned magnetic surface that supports plasmon polaritons. By using different photon energies and polarization states of the incident light we reveal that the electric near-field is either concentrated in spots forming a hexagonal lattice with the same symmetry as the Ni nanopattern or in stripes oriented along the Γ-K direction of the lattice and perpendicular to the polarization direction. We show that the polarization-dependent near-field enhancement on the patterned surface is directly correlated to both the excitation of surface plasmon polaritons on the patterned surface as well as the enhancement of the polar magneto-optical Kerr effect. We obtain a relationship between the size of the enhanced magneto-optical behavior and the polarization and wavelength of optical excitation. The engineering of the magneto-optic response based on the plasmon-induced modification of the optical properties introduces the concept of a magneto-plasmonic meta-structure.


In the early stages, the dorsal root ganglion neurons extend their axons toward the dorsal spinal cord. We previously showed that surround repulsion by semaphorin 3A prevents sensory axons from straying from their paths. The finding, however, that sensory trajectories toward the dorsal spinal cord are almost normal in semaphorin 3A-deficient littermates raises the possibility that a chemoattraction-based mechanism also contributes to the formation of sensory axonal projections. By employing culture assays, we show that the dorsal spinal cord secretes chemoattractants for the dorsal root ganglion axons. Furthermore, we demonstrate that the activity of a dorsal spinal cord-derived cue is specific for early sensory axons. These results suggest that dorsal spinal cord-derived chemoattractants contribute to the formation of the initial trajectories of sensory axons.


Objective: Solubility is a key parameter as it is one of the main causes for poor bioavailability. The objective was to improve the solubility and dissolution profile of poorly-soluble silymarin with a water-soluble carrier fulvic acid. Materials and methods: Phase solubility studies were carried out for the determination of stoichiometric ratio between silymarin and fulvic acid by Higuchi and Connors method. The binary systems made by physical mixing and kneading methods were characterized by drug content, solubility studies, solid-state characterization by DSC, FT-IR, dissolution studies and ex vivo permeation studies. Results and discussion: The phase-solubility studies between silymarin and fulvic acid revealed AL type of curve, indicating linear increase in drug solubility with increase in carrier concentration and from these apparent stability constant and Gibbs free energy transfer values were calculated. It was found that the reaction conditions became more favorable as the concentration of fulvic acid increased from 0.2% to 2% w/v, indicating the spontaneity of solubilization process at higher carrier concentrations. Physical mixture and kneading showed increased solubility and dissolution rates compared with pure drug. In DSC, no melting peak of silymarin was seen, indicating that it was in amorphous form inside the carrier and FT-IR studies demonstrated interactions between drug and carrier. Conclusion: Improvement in solubility, dissolution profiles and permeation was observed in physical mixture and kneading as compared to pure drug establishing the role of fulvic acid as a promising carrier which can be used to formulate silymarin with better in vitro and in vivo performances.


The food industry is dependent on human labor for tasks that require tactile sensing, due in part to a lack of robotic sensors that are delicate enough to interact with food. In this paper we present the design, modeling, and performance of a durometer constructed with soft materials. We performed experiments to investigate the sensor's material selection, repeatability, drift, probing speed, and calibration. We also integrated the sensor into a commercial soft robotic gripper and used it to measure the hardness of an orange. The orange would be damaged by a traditional durometer, but the soft durometer left no visible marks. These results suggest that soft robotic sensors can benefit the food industry and overcome limitations associated with the interaction between robotic systems and fragile objects.


Introduction. The purpose of this analysis was twofold: to track the number of open access journals acquiring impact factor, and to investigate the distribution of subject categories pertaining to these journals. As a case study, journals in which the researchers of the National Institute of Health (Istituto Superiore di Sanita) in Italy have published were surveyed.

Method. Data were collected by searching open access journals listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals ) then compared with those having an impact factor as tracked by the Journal Citation Reports for the years 2010-2012. Journal Citation Reports subject categories were matched with Medical Subject Headings to provide a larger content classification.

Analysis. A survey was performed to determine the Directory journals matching the Journal Citation Reports list, and their inclusion in a given subject area.

Results. In the years 2010-2012, an increase in the number of journals was observed for Journal Citation Reports (+ 4.93%) and for the Directory (+18.51%). The discipline showing the highest increment was medicine (315 occurrences, 26%).

Conclusions. From 2010 to 2012, the number of open access journals with impact factor has gradually risen, with a prevalence for journals relating to medicine and biological science disciplines, suggesting that authors prefer to publish more than before in open access journals.


Network intrusion detection systems (NIDSs) critically rely on processing a great deal of state. Often much of this state resides solely in the volatile processor memory accessible to a single user-level process on a single machine. In this work, we highlight the power of independent state, i.e., internal fine-grained state that can be propagated from one instance of a NIDS to others running either concurrently or subsequently. Independent state provides us with a wealth of possible applications that hold promise for enhancing the capabilities of NIDSs. We discuss an implementation of independent state for the Bro NIDS and examine how we can then leverage independent state for distributed processing, load parallelization, selective preservation of state across restarts and crashes, dynamic reconfiguration, high level policy maintenance, and support for profiling and debugging. We have experimented with each of these applications in several large environments and are now working to integrate them into the sites' operational monitoring. A performance evaluation shows that our implementation is suitable for use even in large scale environments


In this paper we provide examples of topological dynamical systems having either finite or countable scrambled sets. In particular we study conditions for the existence of Li-Yorke, asymptotic and distal pairs in constant--length substitution dynamical systems. Starting from a circle rotation we also construct a dynamical system having Li--Yorke pairs, none of which is recurrent.


Lithological heterogeneity and dissected relief are the main factors that determine trends of soil development and diversity of soil cover within cuesta ridges and slopes of the Lake Belyo basin (Republic of Khakassia, Russia). Hyperskeletic Mollic Leptosols on eluvium of bedrock are predominant within the eluvial landscape position of local watersheds and upper parts of slopes. These soils have a shortened profile and an incomplete set of genetic horizons. Leptic Petrocalcic Chernozems (Endosalic) form on eluvial-deluvial rocks in the eluvial-accumulative positions of local depressions whereas Calcic Chernozems (Endosalic) occupy the transeluvial-accumulative positions of gently sloping lower part of the macroslope of the lacustrine basin. Less developed soils (Leptosols) have a reddish color, small thickness of humus horizons with rather high content of organic matter and high alkalinity of the entire profile with a close bedding of dense calciferous rocks. Chernozems differ by the nature of underlain sediments. Slight sulfate-chloride and sulfate salinization of the profile, which does not hinder the development of vegetation, is typical for these soils. Relatively small thickness of humus profile is characteristic for the studied Chernozems. Humus accumulation in the upper part of the profile turns into sharp decrease in the content of organic carbon with the depth. The presence of soils with different degrees of development on corresponding surfaces reflects certain stage of denudation alignment of elevated forms of relief. Leptosols and Chernozems are different parts of single evolutionary series of soils in a context of continuous translational process of physical weathering within the macroslope of the lacustrine basin. Although Leptosols gradually change to Chernozems at the mesolevel of the entire macroslope, there are areas within the aerials of Chernozems where less developed soils form on fine-grained sediments, which complicates the structure of the soil cover of the whole territory.
Keywords: Steppe; red-colored deposits; cuestas; Chernozems; Leptosols
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In this thesis I endeavor to create an historical corset using a new subset of skills I learned throughout my education at Western Oregon University. I create the corset using skills from classes I have taken in the course of acquiring my degree, through the help of my advisor, and with new skills learned from the research of this project. It is my wish that I understand and am able to replicate in the future, the steps needed in order to create a corset. This includes pattern making and altering, cutting, stitching and fitting. I also wish to impart that knowledge unto others. I also impart historical knowledge about the history of the corset through a brief survey of its creation, use and popularity throughout time. Its use as a foundation garment, the different popular materials of the time, popular opinion and social impact of the corset as well. The historical basis of the corset relays its importance in fashion history. This thesis tracks the steps of this journey through pictures and comments and enables the reader to see how a corset it made through its various steps. The use of pictures enables the work to be seen first-hand instead of merely imagined. This thesis also allows record of what not to do for future projects, or a forewarning for others embarking on the same journey. This thesis allows the reader to not only see my work, but possibly see how interesting the construction of a corset or a garment can be. Perhaps this might inspire projects for the future among those who read this.


The postmining rehabilitation of coastal sand dunes north of Richards Bay (28 8 43 9 S, 32 8 12 9 E), South Africa, is resulting in the development of a series of knownaged stands of vegetation dominated by Acacia karroo (sweet thorn). Other broad-leaved species are establishing themselves in rehabilitating areas more than 12 years of age. Soils from rehabilitating stands 3‐5, 9‐12, 13‐15, and 16‐18 years of age, from two disturbed, unmined stands 30 and 58 years of age, and from a mature unmined stand were examined to assess agerelated trends in selected soil properties. Individually, these stands represent a series of different developmental stages of a coastal dune successional sere. Soil organic material, percentage organic carbon and concentrations of sodium, potassium, magnesium, calcium, and nitrogen increased with an increase in habitat regeneration age. Concentrations of most of these elements were lower than those recorded on the 58year-old unmined and mature unmined stands. Multivariate analyses suggest, however, that the similarity of these values for rehabilitating stands to those for the unmined stands increased with an increase in regeneration age. The growth response of Raphanus sativus (radish) plants, based on mass attained under experimental growing conditions in soil collected from these stands, suggests an increase in soil fertility with an increase in regeneration age.


OBJECTIVE
To evaluate the risk factors and physician's compliance to American College of Chest Physicians (ACCP) guidelines recommendations for venous thromboembolism (VTE) prevention at our hospital.

METHODS
This retrospective cohort study was conducted at King Abdulaziz Hospital, Al-Ahsa, Saudi Arabia from November 2009 to December 2009. We used the American College of Chest Physicians (ACCP) 2008 guidelines and Caprini's scores to assess VTE risk and to determine whether patients had received recommended prophylaxis. All hospital in-patients aged 15 years or above were assessed for risk of VTE by reviewing the hospital chart. A data sheet was developed to obtain the data on demographics, VTE prophylaxis medication, dose, route, duration, and associated risk factors. The primary endpoint was the rate of appropriate thromboprophylaxis.

RESULTS
Nine hundred and sixty-eight patients were included. The mean age was 40 +/- 18.7 years, and 647 (66.8%) were women. According to the ACCP criteria, 547 (56.5%) patients were at risk for VTE. Of 210 patients that qualified for prophylaxis, 117 (55.7%) received some form of prophylaxis. However, 46 (39.3%) of them received ACCP-recommended VTE prophylaxis. In contrast, 25.6% of patients with no risk, according to Caprini score, had thromboprophylaxis prescribed.

CONCLUSION
This study demonstrates that only a small proportion of eligible patients received the recommended VTE prophylaxis. Efforts should be made to develop strategies to improve patient safety practices.