ABSTRACT: BACKGROUND: This study determines the relationship between malaria transmission intensity and morbidity in holoendemic areas of Imo River Basin, Nigeria. RESULTS: Standard entomological and parasitological techniques were used to determine transmission intensity and parasite rates respectively while sociocultural methods and review of hospital records were used to determine morbidity ...

BACKGROUND: Ross River virus (RRV) is endemic in Australia and several South Pacific Islands. Approximately 5000 cases of RRV disease, which is characterized by debilitating polyarthritis, are recorded each year in Australia. This study describes the first clinical trial of a candidate RRV vaccine. METHODS: An inactivated whole-virus Vero cell-derived ...

OBJECTIVE: To investigate whether zinc supplementation could affect serum tumor necrosis factor-alpha (TNF-α) levels in congenital and acquired cardiac patients attending for an influenza vaccine. METHODS: 9-18 years old, voluntary children with cardiac disease were weighed, measured height and blood samples for hemoglobin level, zinc level, IgA and IgG titers ...

The preservative thimerosal contains ethyl mercury (EtHg). Concerns over possible toxicity have reemerged recently, due to its presence in (swine and other) flu vaccines. We examined the potential accumulation of mercury in adults given repeated injections of a thimerosal-preserved vaccine for many years. Fifteen female patients were recruited from an ...

Romantic love is one of our most potent and powerful emotions, but very little is known with respect to the hormonal and psychological mechanisms in play. Romantic love is thought to help intimate partners stay committed to each other and two mechanisms have been proposed to mediate this commitment: increased ...

UV radiation (280-400 nm) is known to affect phytoplankton in negative, neutral and positive ways depending on the species or levels of irradiation energy. However, little has been documented on how photosynthetic physiology and growth of red tide alga respond to UVR in a long-term period. We exposed the cells ...

When immiscible wetting and nonwetting fluids move in parallel in a porous medium, an instability may occur at sufficiently high capillary numbers so that interfaces between the fluids initially held in place by the porous medium are mobilized. A boundary zone containing bubbles of both fluids evolves, which has a ...

A number of mechanisms have been identified that can lead to (acute) aquatic toxicity. The assignment of compounds to a particular mechanism of action is important in the development and utilisation of (quantitative) structure-activity relationships ((Q)SARs) for ecotoxicity. Assignment to a mechanism can be difficult; however in 1992 Verhaar et ...

Micrometer-long nanobelt and nanowires from deposition of perylenediimide (PTCDI) and naphthalenediimide (NPDI) in glass substrates from the gas phase were demonstrated. The electron diffraction pattern of PTCDI shows that the PTCDI molecules are oriented with their long axis perpendicular to the belt and the pi-pi stacking direction parallel to the ...

We propose and study a hierarchical algorithm to generate graphs having a predetermined distribution of cliques, the fully connected subgraphs. The construction mechanism may be either random or incorporate preferential attachment. We evaluate the statistical properties of the graphs generated, such as the degree distribution and network diameters, and compare ...

We have characterized a linear carbonyl-conjugated polyene generated by the iterative polyketide synthase (CalE8) involved in the biosynthesis of the 10-membered enediyne core of calicheamicin. The results provide insight into the mysterious biosynthetic mechanism of the unique enediyne. The carbonyl-conjugated polyene differs from the precursor for 9-membered enediyne, suggesting that ...

Although it is widely accepted that "no-broadcasting"-the nonclonability of quantum information-is a fundamental principle of quantum mechanics, an impossibility theorem for the broadcasting of general density matrices has not yet been formulated. In this Letter, we present a general proof for the no-broadcasting theorem, which applies to arbitrary density matrices. ...

Selfishness is seldom considered a group-beneficial strategy. In the typical evolutionary formulation, altruism benefits the group, selfishness undermines altruism, and the purpose of the model is to identify mechanisms, such as kinship or reciprocity, that enable altruism to evolve. Recent models have explored punishment as an important mechanism favoring the ...

The growth mechanism of the electrodeposited single crystalline nanowires is generally considered to follow a three-dimensional to two-dimensional (2D) transition mode, and as for the 2D growth, it is ordinarily considered as a plane growth mode (layer-by-layer growth mechanism). We report in this Letter the growth of Bi/BiSb superlattice nanowires ...

Two RecA orthologs, Rad51 and Dmc1, mediate homologous recombination in meiotic cells. During budding yeast meiosis, Hed1 coordinates the actions of Rad51 and Dmc1 by down-regulating Rad51 activity. It is thought that Hed1-dependent attenuation of Rad51 facilitates formation of crossovers that are necessary for the correct segregation of chromosomes at ...

We give the number of nilpotent orbits in the Lie algebras of orthogonal groups under the adjoint action of the groups over F(2(n)). Let G be an adjoint algebraic group of type B, C, or D defined over an algebraically closed field of characteristic 2. We construct the Springer correspondence ...

The present experiment investigated whether the gambling of American Indian (AI) and non-AI participants would be sensitive to the actions and/or ethnicity of another gambler (i.e., a confederate) when playing a slot-machine simulation. Eight male AIs and eight male non-AIs participated in five gambling sessions. In one, the participant gambled ...

We use phylogenetic analysis of 1333 bp of mitochondrial DNA sequence to investigate the phylogeny and historical biogeography of the cobra-like elapid snakes, with special reference to the evolution of spitting and the phylogeography of the African spitting cobras, a radiation widespread in open vegetational formations throughout sub-Saharan Africa. Our ...

According to recent simulations, the coalescence of two spinning black holes (BHs) could lead to a BH remnant with recoil speeds of up to thousands of km s(-1). Here we examine the circumstances resulting from a gas-rich galaxy merger under which the ejected BH would carry an accretion disk and ...

Although earrings have been worn since time immemorial, most clinicians will have noticed more and more patients over the past 30 years who have been seen to have single or multiple piercing almost anywhere into the skin. This article will try to trace the history of body piercing, its comparatively ...

The DIS-1 dosemeter from the Finnish company RADOS is an innovative kind of passive electronic dosemeter for photon and beta radiation. This study examines the 'long-term' linear response behaviour, the calibration and readout accuracy with large samples of 'used' DIS-1 dosemeters especially in the low-dose region, which is of special ...

AIMS: To assess the effects of solar UV-B radiation on phyllosphere bacteria of tea leaves in relation to blister blight disease in the field. METHODS AND RESULTS: The effects of UV-B radiation on the phyllosphere microbiology of tea (Camellia sinensis) were studied in contrasting wet and dry seasons at a ...

Lead and plastic are commonly used to shield beta radiation. Radiation protection literature is ubiquitous in advising the placement of plastic first to absorb all the beta particles before any lead shielding is used. This advice is based on the well established theory that radiative losses (bremsstrahlung production) are more ...

A recent physiological finding of neural coding for border ownership (BO) that defines the direction of a figure with respect to the border has provided a possible basis for figure-ground segregation. To explore the underlying neural mechanisms of BO, we investigated stimulus configurations that activate BO circuitry through psychophysical investigation ...

Modern Old World monkeys live in an array of habitats, an ability that was established early in their evolutionary history. The Old World monkey radiation is commonly correlated with the general trend of climatic cooling in the Neogene and the associated increase in open habitats. However, although they became more ...

The dynamics of a periodically delta-kicked Hamiltonian system moving at low speed (i.e., at speed much less than the speed of light) is studied numerically. In particular, the trajectory of the system predicted by Newtonian mechanics is compared with the trajectory predicted by special relativistic mechanics for the same parameters ...

Utilization of Fusarium-infected barley for malting may lead to mycotoxin production during malting and decreased malt quality. Electron-beam irradiation may prevent safety and quality defects and allow use of otherwise good quality barley. We evaluated electron-beam irradiation for preventing Fusarium growth and mycotoxin production while maintaining barley-malt quality characteristics. Four ...

Siemens linacs use multileaf collimators (MLCs) that move in an arc such that the flat faces of the leaf ends are always in the same plane as the radiation focus. An effect of this is that the magnification of the leaf end projection at the isocentric plane normal to the ...

BACKGROUND: Spatially discordant cellular alternans form a substrate for development of unidirectional block and ventricular fibrillation. However, the mechanisms responsible for discordant alternans remain poorly understood. Previous work suggests electrical restitution is critical to the development of alternans in single cells. OBJECTIVES: The purpose of this study was to investigate ...

Recombinant erythropoietin (EPO) was introduced into clinical practice after the identification of EPO as the major haemopoietic growth factor determining survival and maturation of erythroid precursors. Advances in our understanding of the novel sites of action of EPO in the vasculature, brain, heart and kidney have opened new avenues of ...

TeV-scale gravity theories allow the possibility of producing small black holes at energies that soon will be explored at the CERN LHC or at the Auger observatory. One of the expected signatures is the detection of Hawking radiation that might eventually terminate if the black hole, once perturbed, leaves the ...

We report a superlattice parametric oscillator (SPO), with a GaAs/AlAs superlattice as the active element. The SPO was pumped by a microwave field (power 4 mW) and produced third harmonic radiation at subterahertz frequencies (near 300 GHz; 0.1 mW). We attribute the parametric gain to the nonlinearity of the miniband ...

Within the Ginzburg-Landau formalism, we predict two novel mechanisms of vortex-antivortex nucleation in a magnetically nanostructured superconductor. Although counterintuitive, nucleation of vortex-antivortex pairs can be activated in a superconducting (SC) film covered by arrays of submicron ferromagnets (FMs) when exposed to an external homogeneous magnetic field. In another scenario, we ...

Urocanic acid (UCA) is present at millimolar concentrations in mammalian epidermis and undergoes photoisomerization from the naturally occurring trans-isomer to the cis-isomer on exposure to ultraviolet radiation (UVR). Cis-UCA causes downregulation of various immune responses in mouse and human experimental models and has been proposed as both a chromophore and ...

In 1903 W. Crookes demonstrated in England his "spinthariscope" for the visual observation of individual scintillations caused by alpha particles impinging upon a ZnS screen. In contrast to the analogue methods of radiation measurements in that time the spinthariscope was a single-particle counter, being the precursor of scintillation counters since. ...

Formates and dithionates of 6Li, enriched and 7Li in natural composition of Li offer a possibility to measure the absorbed dose from photons and thermal neutrons in a mixed radiation field for instance at a boron neutron capture therapy (BNCT) facility. Tests with formates and dithionates of enriched 6Li and ...

The application of the concept of body-fixed reference frames, proposed by C. Eckart [Phys. Rev. 47, 552 (1935)], to the problem of the separation of three collective angles in quantum N-body problems is analyzed based on the technique recently developed by Meremianin and Briggs [Phys. Rep. 384, 121 (2003)]. Special ...

The fatty acid synthase inhibitor C75 reduces feeding rapidly and for several days. We investigated brain sites potentially involved in actions of i.p. C75 in mice by examining c-Fos. At 3 h C75 increased numbers of c-Fos-immunoreactive cells in hindbrain feeding-related nuclei, and in the paraventricular nucleus (PVN), lateral aspects ...

Scientists will remember Max Perutz for his outstanding analysis of the molecular structure, properties and allosteric mechanism of haemoglobin, but his wonderful clarity and simplicity in writing on the widest range of topics has made him famous far beyond the haemoglobin fraternity. He left many autobiographical essays on different events ...

The alkane content of the silks of nine maize genotypes was analyzed to investigate the role of silk wax in resistance to Fusarium graminearum. Silk samples were collected 2, 4, 6, and 8 days after silk emergence and divided into three sections: exposed silk, silk channel silk, and silk that ...

Developmental robustness, the capacity to stay "on track" despite the myriad vicissitudes that inevitably plague a developing organism, is, I argue, a prerequisite for natural selection and key to our understanding of the evolution of developmental processes. But how is such robustness achieved? And how can we reconcile this property ...

The relative biological effectiveness (RBE) of mixed neutron and gamma-ray radiation emitted at a 252Cf source at the Research Institute for Radiation Biology and Medicine, Hiroshima University, compared with 60Co gamma-ray radiation was determined. The tissue-absorbed dose contribution of the accompanying gamma radiation was about 35.7% to the total tissue-absorbed ...

Skin hyperpigmentation is caused by the overproduction of melanin pigment, which is synthesized by the action of tyrosinase. We recently reported that aloesin inhibits tyrosinase activity. The present study was undertaken to test the inhibitory effect of aloesin on pigmentation in human skin after UV radiation. Experimental subjects were UV-irradiated ...

Near an event horizon, the action of general relativity acquires a new asymptotic conformal symmetry. For two-dimensional dilaton gravity, this symmetry results in a chiral Virasoro algebra, and Cardy's formula for the density of states reproduces the Bekenstein-Hawking entropy. This lends support to the notion that black hole entropy is ...

Bupropion, a tobacco-cessation product, shares discriminative stimulus effects with cocaine and methamphetamine. The discriminative stimulus effects of these drugs, in turn, overlap with those of nicotine. This study investigated the overlap in discriminative stimulus effects of bupropion and nicotine. Rats were trained to discriminate 0.4 mg/kg (-)-nicotine from saline in ...

The annihilation rate of weakly interacting cold dark matter particles at the galactic center could be greatly enhanced by the growth of a density spike around the central supermassive black hole (SBH). Here we discuss the effects of hierarchical mergers on the central spike. Mergers between halos containing SBHs lead ...

A brief overview on thermogenic mechanisms in young precocial birds is given. While shivering thermogenesis is well documented in these birds, evidence for a facultative non-shivering component of heat production, comparable to that found in the brown adipose tissue of mammals, is ambiguous. One reason for this is the confusion ...

Polymer composites of Al-Cu-Fe quasicrystals and ultra-high molecular weight polyethylene (UHMWPE) were investigated for use in acetabular cup prosthetics. The wear properties of the Al-Cu-Fe/UHMWPE samples and a 440 steel ball counterface were measured. The mechanical strength of the Al-Cu-Fe/UHMWPE composites was compared to UHMWPE and alumina/UHMWPE. The biocompatibility of ...

We analyze the current in a superconducting point contact of arbitrary transmission in the presence of a microwave radiation. The interplay between the ac Josephson current and the microwave signal gives rise to Shapiro steps at voltages V = (m/n)h(omega)(r)/2e, where n,m are integer numbers and omega(r) is the radiation ...

This chapter presents updated information on the trends and patterns of non-Hodgkin's lymphoma (NHL) diagnoses as well as new information on chemotherapeutic and immunotherapeutic options for NHL treatment. In Section I, Dr. Brian Chiu summarizes the current knowledge regarding the etiologic factors and patterns of NHL as well as suggests ...