One of the more difficult ethical questions from a public decision-making perspective is whether the estimation of benefits from risk reducing projects should be influenced by factors such as age groups and risk domains. For example, should a project that saves the lives of elderly people be assigned a more different benefit value in cost-benefit analyses than one that saves the same number of chi

The European Safety Reliability and Data Association (ESReDA) established in year 2000, a Working Group on Accident Investigation (WGAI) that ended in the year 2008. With the objective of improving the quality of accident investigation and as a consequence the learning from experience process and the safety performance, the working group tasked itself at two levels: the first one, at a societal, i

In application areas that process stream-like data such as multimedia, networking and DSP, the pipelined concurrent processing is frequently represented as a dataflow network of communicating computational kernels connected by FIFO queues. However, while dataflow is a natural medium for conceptualizing and modeling stream-processing systems, its adoption as a programming methodology has been hinde

We describe a patient in whom the motor branch to the first dorsal interosseous muscle was injured by the pins of an fixator used to treat an unstable fracture of the distal radius. She was successfully treated by extensor indicis proprius transfer to the base of the proximal phalanx of the index finger.

In the postgenomic era, it has become evident that analysis of genetic and protein expression changes alone is not sufficient to understand most disease processes in e.g. cardiovascular and cancer disease. Biobanking has been identified as an important area for development and discovery of better diagnostic tools and new treatment modalities. Biobanks are developed in order to integrate the collec

Background: Curcumin is a polyphenol and the one of the principle curcuminoids of the spice turmeric. Its antioxidant, anti-cancer and anti-inflammatory effects have been intensively studied. Previous in vivo studies showed that administration of curcumin also decreased cholesterol levels in the blood, and the effects were considered to be related to upregulation of LDL receptor. However, since pl

Economic crises directly and indirectly affect the financial health of museums. Despite this reality, however, analysing the impact of the economic cycle on museums has not generated much interest among researchers; to date published studies on the recent financial crisis and its reverberations in the museum sector are rare. This article, after acknowledging this lack of research, discusses specif

The ability of chondroitin/dermatan sulfate (CS/DS) to convey biological information is enriched by the presence of iduronic acid. DS-epimerases 1 and 2 (DS-epi1 and 2), in conjunction with DS-4-O-sulfotransferase 1, are the enzymes responsible for iduronic acid biosynthesis and will be the major focus of this review. CS/DS proteoglycans (CS/DS-PGs) are ubiquitously found in connective tissues, ba

Pollution-induced community tolerance (PICT) of soil bacteria to the antibiotic tylosin was studied over 95 days. Tylosin was added at increasing concentrations, together with different amounts of alfalfa to study the effects of substrate addition on PICT and bacterial growth in soil. The leucine incorporation technique was used to estimate bacterial growth and as a detection method in the PICT co

Partial migration is a common phenomenon among many animals and occurs in many types of ecosystems. Understanding the mechanisms behind partial migration is of major importance for the understanding of population dynamics and, eventually, ecosystem processes. We studied the effects of food availability on the seasonal partial migration of cyprinid fish from a lake to connected streams during winte

Carbon assimilation defined as the overall rate of fixation of carbon through the process of photosynthesis is central to the climate change research. The present study compares the two well-known algorithms in satellite based carbon assimilation estimation, the Vegetation Photosynthesis Model (VPM) and the MOD 17A2 GPP Model, over the tropical forest types in India for a period of two years (Sept

Multiple factors contribute to the pathogenesis and prognosis of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), still requiring new therapeutic strategies and medications for the disease. The aim of the present study is to investigate the model of lipopolysaccharide (LPS)-induced chronic lung injury and hyperinflation and test therapeutic effects of peroxisome proliferator-activated receptor (PPAR)

The objectives of the study were to compare antibody response in immunosuppressed patients with rheumatoid arthritis (RA) after vaccination with heptavalent pneumococcal conjugate vaccine (PCV7) to that of RA patients and healthy controls vaccinated with 23-valent polysaccharide vaccine (PPV23) and to study the impact of disease and/or treatment characteristics and type of vaccine on antibody resp