Faunal communities have been shaped in different ways by past climatic change. The impact of the termination of the last Glacial and the onset of the present (Holocene) Interglacial on large-scale faunal shifts, extinction dynamics and gene pools of species are of special interest in natural sciences. A general pattern of climate-triggered range expansion and local extinction of vertebrate species

In embedded real-time systems, task priorities are often assigned to meet deadlines. However, in control tasks, a late completion of a task has no catastrophic consequence. Rather, it has a quantifiable impact in the control performance achieved by the task. In this paper, we address the problem of determining the optimal assignment of priorities and periods of sampled-data control tasks that run

Background: Interactions between Th1 and Th2 immune responses are of importance to the onset and development of allergic disorders. A Toll-like receptor 7 agonist such as AZD8848 may have potential as a treatment for allergic airway disease by skewing the immune system away from a Th2 profile. Objective: To evaluate the efficacy and safety of intranasal AZD8848. Methods: In a placebo-controlled si

To investigate whether early coronary angiography (CAG) after out-of-hospital cardiac arrest of a presumed cardiac cause is associated with improved outcomes in patients without acute ST elevation.

Producing more food per unit of water has never been as important as it is at present, and the demand for water by economic sectors other than agriculture will necessarily put a great deal of pressure on a dwindling resource, leading to a call for increases in the productivity of water in agriculture. This topic has been given high priority in the research agenda for the last 30 years, but with th

This paper takes inspiration from the field of bio-mimicry to suggest what a plant biosecurity system might look like if it was modelled on the human immune system. We suggest structural and institutional changes to current biosecurity systems that would facilitate adaptive preparation and response policies, focusing particularly on the Australian plant biosecurity system. By improving information

Key points Myocardial infarction patients have altered platelet miRNA profilesActivated platelets release miRNAs that can be taken up by endothelial cells and regulate ICAM1 gene expression.

Abstract in UndeterminedPrevious research on antonyms has shown that some pairings form more felicitous couplings than others. Following up on that research, we conducted two semantic categorization experiments using Event Related Potentials to establish whether there are neurophysiological differences related to levels of antonym canonicity. In Experiment 1, the members of canonical antonym pairs

Often in clinical practice, a diagnosis of alcohol dependence or abuse does not provide enough information to establish an adequate treatment plan. Hence, multidimensional instruments have been constructed better to describe the extent and character of a patient's alcohol problem. The purpose of the current article is to present the AVI-R2, a self-report test that provides a standardized and diffe

The purpose of this paper is to present a novel combined design of the voltage source converter–high voltage direct current (VSC-HVDC) and the power system stabilizer (PSS) controllers to obtain a better dynamical response. The proposed technique is applied to enhance the damping of the power system low-frequency oscillations (LFOs) and results are compared with traditional design. A fuzzy logic c

This paper verified the macro-to-mini-scale criterion BoRe10.5=200 because data points where BoRe10.5≤200 and BoRe10.5>200 show very different trends for the entire database (1672 data points). Boiling number at critical heat flux (Blchf) decreases greatly with heated length-to-diameter ratio (Lh/dhe) when Lh/dhe is small while a relatively smooth trend occurs with large Lh/dhe values. The paper p

Lower visibility of female scientists, compared to male scientists, is a potential reason for the under-representation of women among senior academic ranks. Visibility in the scientific community stems partly from presenting research as an invited speaker at organized meetings. We analysed the sex ratio of presenters at the European Society for Evolutionary Biology (ESEB) Congress 2011, where all

External electric field is incorporated into the generalized Mulliken-Hush model and Marcus theory. With this new development, we have investigated the field-dependent electronic structure and rate of photoinduced charge transfer in organic donor-acceptor dyad using time-dependent density functional theory and extensive multidimensional visualization techniques. The model is used to evaluate the i

Immune defense may vary as a result of trade-offs with other life-history traits or in parallel with variation in antigen levels in the environment. We studied lark species (Alaudidae) in the Arabian Desert and temperate Netherlands to test opposing predictions from these two hypotheses. Based on their slower pace of life, the trade-off hypothesis predicts relatively stronger immune defenses in de

Objective: To propose and evaluate a new method for assessing the potential impact on speech intelligibility when wearing a hearing protection device (HPD) in a noisy environment. Design: The method is based on a self adaptive method for finding the speech reception threshold (SRT) using speech material from the Callsign acquisition test (CAT) presented at a constant level while adjusting the leve

Activation of microglia and inflammation-mediated neurotoxicity are suggested to have key roles in the pathogenesis of several neurodegenerative disorders. We recently published an article in Nature revealing an unexpected role for executioner caspases in the microglia activation process. We showed that caspases 8 and 3/7, commonly known to have executioner roles for apoptosis, can promote microgl

We study changes in ultrafast transient absorption due to photodegradation of quantum dots attached to ZnO nanowire. The time-resolved measurements reveal impact of photodegradation on three distinct kinetic components present in transient absorption tau similar to 7 ps, 80 ps, and 7.5 ns). In addition, we observe superlinear dependence of photodegradation rate on concentration of excited electron

Desferrioxamine-B (DFOB) is a bacterial trihydroxamate siderophore and probably the most studied to date. However, the manner in which DFOB adsorbs at mineral surfaces and promotes dissolution is still under discussion. Here we investigated the adsorption and dissolution reactions in the goethite-DFOB system using both in situ infrared spectroscopic and quantitative analytical methods. Experiments

Introduction: Rapid detection of, and optimized treatment for, severe sepsis and septic shock is crucial for successful outcome. Heparin-binding protein (HBP), a potent inducer of increased vascular permeability, is a potentially useful biomarker for predicting outcome in patients with severe infections. Our aim was to study the systemic release and dynamics of HBP in the plasma of patients with s