In the course of 2000s, the region of Campania in southern Italy and its capital city Naples became global icons of waste mismanagement after the images of piles of rubbish occluding their urban areas hit the headlines. Conventional explanations, in Italy and elsewhere, pointed to administrative failure, cultural backwardness and mafia infiltration as the main causes of waste mishandling. In the s

A fisheries management model that identifies the economic optimal management of fisheries under the influence of nutrients is presented. The model starts from the idea that growth in fish biomass increases with increasing availability of nutrients owing to higher food availability up to a peak, after which growth falls due to eutrophication. The model is applied to Swedish and Danish cod fisheries

In this work, we propose a method for finding an optimal, non-uniform, sampling scheme for a general class of signals in which the signal measurements may be non-linear functions of the parameters to be estimated. Formulated as a convex optimization problem reminiscent of the sensor selection problem, the method determines an optimal sampling scheme given a suitable estimation bound on the paramet

Etnopharmacological relevance: Thirty-eight Tacana medicinal plant species used to treat skin problems, including leishmania ulcers, skin infections, inflammation and wound healing, were collected in the community of Buena Vista, Bolivia, with the Tacana people. Twenty two species are documented for the first time as medicinal plants for this ethnic group living in the northern area of the Departm

Mechanical grooming to remove litter and wrack from sandy beaches reduces strandline biodiversity. The impact of tidal range on recovery rates of strandline ecosystems after grooming has not been examined to date, even though tidal range is known to affect the spatial and temporal patterns of seaweed. We compared taxon richness of macroinvertebrates that occur all year round at 104 sites on two co

Mutations in the PARK2 gene, which encodes PARKIN, are the most frequent cause of autosomal recessive Parkinson's disease (PD). We report the generation of an induced pluripotent stem cell (iPSC) line from a 78-year-old patient carrying a compound heterozygous mutation (c.823C > T and EX6del) in the PARK2 gene. Skin fibroblasts were reprogrammed using the non-integrating Sendai virus technology to

What is the relationship between landholding inequality and rural unrest? And why does land reform that ostensibly addresses rural grievances sometimes exacerbate unrest? We advance the understanding of these longstanding questions by shifting the emphasis from how landholding inequality fuels rural grievances to how it captures the collective action capacity of landowners. Using municipal-level d

Fluorescent molecularly imprinted polymers (MIPs) have received considerable attention for their promising applications in sensing, imaging and diagnostics. Different synthetic methods have been reported to prepare fluorescent MIPs. Here, one-pot polymerization method was developed to synthesize fluorescent MIP nanoparticles (NPs) bearing a suitable fluorescent label as the fluorescence acceptor.

A major problem in CTG analysis is that detectionof a suspicious pattern in short intervals so that one can reducethe damage caused by a delay of an automatic monitoringsystem. In this paper, we aim for improving intrapartumsurveillance based on signal processing and machine learningtechniques. We evaluate a classification method on a real dataset.

The high resolution near edge X-ray absorption fine structure spectrum of nitrogen displays the vibrational structure of the core-excited states. This makes nitrogen well suited for assessing the accuracy of different electronic structure methods for core excitations. We report high resolution experimental measurements performed at the SOLEIL synchrotron facility. These are compared with theoretic

We use Markov state models (MSMs) to analyze the dynamics of a β-hairpin-forming peptide in Monte Carlo (MC) simulations with interacting protein crowders, for two different types of crowder proteins [bovine pancreatic trypsin inhibitor (BPTI) and GB1]. In these systems, at the temperature used, the peptide can be folded or unfolded and bound or unbound to crowder molecules. Four or five major fre

This paper provides sufficient conditions under which convex monotonic evolutionary dynamics (a class of imitative dynamics that includes the replicator dynamic) select against strategies that do not survive iterated elimination of weakly dominated strategies. We apply these conditions to Bertrand duopolies, first-price auctions, finitely repeated Prisoner's Dilemmas, and the p-Beauty Contests. Ou

Data representation migration is a program transformation that involves changing the type of a particular data structure, and then updating all of the operations that somehow depend on that data structure according to the new type. Changing the data representation can provide benefits such as improving efficiency and improving the quality of the computed results. Performing such a transformation i

Molecular imprinting technique is an attractive strategy to prepare materials for target recognition and rapid separation. In this work, a new type of diclofenac (DFC)–imprinted polymer beads was synthesized by Pickering emulsion polymerization using 2-(dimethylamino)ethyl methacrylate as the functional monomer. The selectivity and capacity of the molecularly imprinted polymers (MIPs) were investi

Objective: To investigate the effectiveness of a culturally adapted lifestyle intervention for changing dietary intake, particularly energy, fat and fibre intakes, in the intervention group (IG) compared with the control group (CG). Design: Randomised controlled trial. Setting: IG (n 50) and CG (n 46). The IG was offered seven group sessions, including one cooking class, over a period of 4 months.