Traditional management of scarce water resources has been practiced in the Middle East for thousands of years. They were developed to encompass a sustainable agricultural production in spite of small rainfall amounts in often harsh arid to semiarid environments with poor soil quality (e.g., jessour, tabiah, meskat, khooshab, qanat). Due to their efficiency, revitalized systems have been suggested

A common industrial process for separating particles from a liquid is continuous sedimentation, which is used in the chemical, mining, pulp-and-paper and food industries. It can also be found in most wastewater treatment plants, where it is a crucial subprocess of a complex biological system. The process has provided, and will continue to provide, scientific problems that lead to fundamental resea

Stem cell-based cell replacement therapies aiming at restoring injured or diseased brain function ultimately rely on the capability of transplanted cells to promote functional recovery. The mechanisms by which stem cell-based therapies for neurological conditions can lead to functional recovery are uncertain, but structural and functional repair appears to depend on integration of transplanted cel

Neurobiological markers in cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) and in serum, previously found to co-vary with destructive personality traits in violent offenders, were explored in a general population sample of 21 patients undergoing knee surgery. Results on the Karolinska Scales of Personality (KSP) and the Temperament and Character Inventory (TCI) were compared with CSF/serum albumin ratios and serum conc

Welding fume consists of metal fumes, e.g., manganese (Mn) and gases, e.g., ozone. Particles in the respirable dust (RD) size range dominate. Exposure to welding fume could cause short- and long-term respiratory effects. The prevalence of work-related symptoms among mild steel welders was studied, and the occupational exposure to welding fumes was quantified by repeated measurements of RD, respira

PURPOSE: To estimate the prevalence and severity of undetected glaucoma in the population. DESIGN: Cross-sectional study. PARTICIPANTS: A total of 32 918 subjects aged 55 to 79 years from Malmö, Sweden, who were screened between 1992 and 1997. All subjects in the screened age groups living in the catchment area, and for whom there were no recent records at the Malmö University Hospital Ophthalmolo

Plant phenological development is orchestrated through subtle changes in photoperiod, temperature, soil moisture and nutrient availability. Presently, the exact timing of plant development stages and their response to climate and management practices are crudely represented in land surface models. As visual observations of phenology are laborious, there is a need to supplement long-term observatio

We demonstrate that the detected emission intensity from YOYO-labeled DNA molecules confined in 180 nm deep Si/SiO2 nano-funnels changes significantly and not monotonically with the width of the funnel. This effect may be of importance for quantitative fluorescence microscopy and for experiments with a tight photon budget.

Crop diversification and maintenance of semi-natural habitats (grasslands and field boundaries) are suggested to enhance farmland biodiversity, but the relative importance of these factors remains poorly known. We evaluated how crop diversity and availability of semi-natural grasslands at a landscape-scale interacted with local farming management (three management types from low to high intensity:

In this article, we revisit a classical optimization problem occurring in designing survivable multicommodity flow networks. The problem, referred to as FR, assumes flow restoration that takes advantage of the so-called stub release. As no compact linear programming (LP) formulation of FR is known and at the same time all known noncompact LP formulations of FR exhibit NP-hard dual separation, the

Abstract Breast volume measurement is valuable in clinical practice, and various methods have been used. Nonetheless, no commonly accepted standard technique exists for clinical everyday use and there is no optimal method that is quick, cheap, minimally invasive, and acceptable for the patient and for the surgeon. Previously, a study has shown that the volume measured with plastic cups differed li

Three cranidia of a conocoryphid trilobite are described from the lower Caesaraugustan Regional Stage (upper part of provisional Cambrian Stage 5 within Cambrian Series 3) in the Iberian Chains, Spain. The material is from the upper part of the Mansilla Formation and the base of the overlying Murero Formation. It closely resembles Bailiella tenuicincta (Linnarsson, 1879), which has previously been

Twenty 10- to 18-year-old children and adolescents with varying degrees of hearing impairment (HI) and hearing aids (HA), ranging from mild-moderate to severe, produced picture-elicited narratives in a spoken and written version. Their performance was compared to that of 63 normally hearing (NH) peers within the same age span. The participants with HI and NH showed similar patterns regarding intra

The Scandinavian Total Ankle Replacement (STAR) has been used widely in Europe and more recently in the United States. We studied the results of the single-coated and the double-coated STAR with long-term follow-up.

Histidine (His) residues in proteins can attain three different protonation states at normal pH. This constitutes a prominent problem when adding protons to a protein crystal structure, e.g. in order to perform molecular simulations. Typically, the His protonation is deduced from the hydrogen-bond pattern in crystal structures. Here, we study whether it is possible to detect erroneous His protonat

Dermatan sulfate (DS) is a highly sulfated polysaccharide with a variety of biological functions in extracellular matrix organization and processes such as tumorigenesis and wound healing. A distinct feature of DS is the presence of iduronic acid, produced by the two enzymes, DS-epimerase 1 and 2, which are encoded by Dse and Dsel, respectively.

The prognosis of patients with postanoxic coma (PAC) after cardiac arrest is a challenging task for clinicians. The need for early and accurate prognostic predictors is crucial. Treatment with therapeutic hypothermia and sedation alters the reliability of neurological examination. Considering the extensive literature existing on this topic, we aimed to provide a practical approach on how to predic