The blood lead (PbB) and blood cadmium (CdB) levels, as well as the parental smoking habits, of 133 children aged 4 to 11 years were studied. The children were from a town with a lead smeltery and a surrounding rural area. There was a significant association between the higher PbB levels of the children and involuntary (parental) smoking in the home. The CdB levels of the children were not affecte

Sporulation in aerial hyphae of Streptomyces coelicolor involves profound changes in regulation of fundamental morphogenetic and cell cycle processes to convert the filamentous and multinucleoid cells to small unigenomic spores. Here, a novel sporulation locus consisting of smeA (encoding a small putative membrane protein) and sffA (encoding a SpoIIIE/FtsK-family protein) is characterized. Deletio

In this article, a teleological model for analysis of everyday ethical situations in dementia care is used to analyse and clarify perennial ethical problems in nursing home care for persons with dementia. This is done with the aim of describing how such a model could be useful in a concrete care context. The model was developed by Sandman and is based on four aspects: the goal; ethical side-constr

Lipophilic persistent organic pollutants (POPs) are ubiquitous in the environment and suspected to interfere with hormone activities and reproduction. In previous studies we demonstrated that POP exposure can affect sperm DNA integrity and differences between Inuits and Europeans in sperm DNA integrity and xenobiotic activity were observed. The aim of this study was to investigate possible relatio

We show that the boundary conditions entering in the definition of the self-adjoint operator Delta(A,B) describing the Laplacian plus afinite number of point interactions are local if and only if the corresponding wave equation phi = Delta(A,B)phi has finite speed of propagation.

OBJECTIVE. The objective of our study was to evaluate the effect of supplementation with docosahexaenoic acid and arachidonic acid for human milk-fed preterm infants. The primary end point was cognitive development at 6 months of age. METHODS. The study was a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled study among 141 infants with birth weights of

The feasibility of 17 beta-estradiol (E2) and 17 alpha-ethynylestradiol (EE2) removal by Trametes versicolor was demonstrated in batch and continuous cultures. In batch, E2 and EE2 initially supplied at 10 mg l(-1) were removed by more than 97% in 24 h, which corresponded to volumetric removal rates of 0.43 and 0.44 mg l(-1) h(-1), respectively. A bioreactor inoculated with T versicolor pellets wa

Among the responses to this month's question, the most common strategy for motivating compliance is providing information. This finding is also supported with the example from Australia, where stoke sufferers are highly compliant with any intervention aimed at prevention of future strokes. In this case, the high level of compliance and (probably) motivation can be explained by the fact that stroke

Ultrafast time-resolved fluorescence spectroscopy has been used to investigate the excited-state dynamics of the basic eumelanin building block 5,6-dihydroxyindole-2-carboxylic acid (DHICA), its acetylated, methylated, and carboxylic ester derivatives, and two oligomers, a dimer and a trimer in the O-acetylated forms. The results show that (1) excited-state decays are faster for the trimer relativ

This paper describes a system to create animated 3D scenes of car accidents from written reports. The text-to-scene conversion process consists of two stages. An information extraction module creates a tabular description of the accident and a visual, simulator generates and animates the scene. We outline the overall structure of the text-to-scene conversion and the template structure. We then des

Coronary heart disease remains an important cause of morbidity and mortality. Much data support the view that social support is associated with coronary heart disease. Participants of the study "Men born in 1914," (414 men) were followed from a baseline measurement in 1982183 until the end of 1996. At baseline, the men answered a questionnaire on social support and participated in a stressful test

Acknowledging the social constructivist turn in the study of norms, this article offers to demonstrate that the notion of norms is useful as an analytical tool and likely to become a lasting element in international relations theory. Ideational causality and the independent explanatory power of norms are methodological issues that have been debated widely. Despite arguing that norms matter, social

The healthy vaginal ecosystem is maintained by the interaction of the vaginal epithelium and the microflora, where lactobacilli and occasionally bifidobacteria play an important role. Imbalances in the dominance of lactobacilli may lead to bacterial vaginosis or yeast vaginitis. Probiotics may be a means to secure a favourable microbial balance in the vagina and, as the normal vaginal flora ascend

The maximum limits of the Eurasian ice sheets during four glaciations have been reconstructed: (1) the Late Saalian (> 140 ka), (2) the Early Weichselian (100-80 ka), (3) the Middle Weichselian (60-50 ka) and (4) the Late Weichselian (25-15 ka). The reconstructed ice limits are based on satellite data and aerial photographs combined with geological field investigations in Russia and Siberia, and w

The coastal zone of Norrbotten, northern Sweden, was gradually inundated by the Ancylus Lake following the retreating ice margin and forming a highest coastline approximately 210 m above the present sea level. The succeeding shore displacement is reconstructed based on lithological investigations and radiocarbon datings of identified isolation sequences from 12 cored lake basins. The highest lake

Glacontryphan-M, a novel calcium-dependent inhibitor of L-type voltage-gated Ca2+ channels expressed in mouse pancreatic beta-cells, was recently isolated from the venom of the cone snail Conus marmoreus (Hansson, K., Ma, X., Eliasson, L., Czerwiec, E., Furie, B., Furie, B. C., Rorsman, P., and Stenflo, J. ( 2004) J. Biol. Chem. 278, 32453-32463). The conserved disulfide-bonded loop of the contryp