Background: Asthmatic patients have higher microbiome diversity and an altered composition, with more Proteobacteria and less Bacteroidetes compared with healthy control subjects. Studies comparing airway inflammation and the airway microbiome are sparse, especially in subjects not receiving anti-inflammatory treatment. Objective: We sought to describe the relationship between the airway microbiom

Patients and methods A comprehensive literature search was conducted. We measured pooled rate of lesion visualization improvement and improvement in lesion detection comparing FICE settings 1 – 3 and WLE, for angioectasias and ulcers/erosions. Pooled results were derived using the random-effects model because of high heterogeneity as measured by I 2. Repeated-measures analysis of variance (ANOVA)

The human-environment connection in the mostly rural drylands of sub-Saharan Africa forms a complex, interlinked system that provides ecosystem services. This system is susceptible to climatic variability that impacts the supply of its products, and high population growth, which impacts the demand for these products. When plants remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere through the process of phot

In 2009 the Democratic Party of Japan came to power with a new foreign policy tailored to the regional and global power shift from the United States to China: a more equal relationship with the United States and improved relations with Japan’s Asian neighbours. Within nine months the new Prime Minister Hatoyama Yukio resigned and the foreign policy shift was jettisoned by his successors. Conventio

China uses half the world’s annual coal consumption, since coal is the primary energy source for heating in urban areas, particularly in northern China. This entails significant challenges for urban air quality in China and for the global climate. Unlike the electricity and transportation sectors, the heating sector has received little attention from policy and research actors in China, despite ve

With industrial robots ready to take the next step in mastering manufacturing tasks new approaches to reduce the programming effort are needed. This is achieved by introducing skills as robot "know-how" and using them as a higher abstraction level of robot instructions during programming. The skills are reusable items providing motion control and rich declarative descriptions of complex robot capa

Advanced analytical techniques have revealed a high degree of complexity in the chemical makeup of dissolved organic matter (DOM). This has opened the door for a deeper understanding of the role of DOM in the aquatic environment. However, the expense, analytical cost, and challenges related to interpretation of the large datasets generated by these methods limit their widespread application. Optic

Using liquid crystal thermography, experimental studies were carried out to investigate the local heat transfer of an obstacle integrated with a rib. The rib was positioned in the upstream region of the obstacle to disturb the boundary layer of the approaching flow by precipitating the flow separation and reatt achment. The spacing between the rib and the obstacle is of primary importance. The spa

Through new tracking techniques, data on timing and routes of migration in long-distance migrant birds are accumulating. However, studies of the consistency of migration of the same individuals between years are still rare in small-sized passerine birds. This type of information is important to understand decisions and migration abilities at the individual level, but also for life history theory,

Understanding the genetic basis of phenotypic variation is a major challenge in biology. Here, we systematically evaluate 146 quantitative trait loci (QTL) studies on teleost fish over the last 15 years to investigate (i) temporal trends and (ii) factors affecting QTL detection and fine-mapping. The number of fish QTL studies per year increased over the review period and identified a cumulative nu

This paper is based on an ethnographic study conducted in Sweden and focuses on the emotional aspect, both its rhetoric and interaction, of the victim offender mediation process. The emotion culture is examined, as well as the basic feeling rules that tell victims and offenders how to feel, value, and manage their own, and the other party's feelings in the mediation process. If mediation is done '

Increased interest in hemicelluloses as a renewable source of biopolymers has resulted in an interest in hemicelluloses in process streams in pulp mills. The aim of this study was to compare potential positions for the withdrawal of hemicelluloses from mechanical pulp mills. Samples were withdrawn at a total of fourteen positions from two thermomechanical and two chemi-thermomechanical pulp mills.

Perturbation problems for operators with embedded eigenvalues are generally challenging since the embedded eigenvalues cannot be separated from the rest of the spectrum. In this paper, we study a perturbation problem for embedded eigenvalues for a magnetic Schrödinger operator, when the underlying domain is a cylinder. The magnetic potential is C2 with an algebraic decay rate as the unbounded vari

BACKGROUND: Elevated plasma levels of heparin-binding protein (HBP) are associated with risk of organ dysfunction and mortality in sepsis, but little is known about causality and mechanisms of action of HBP. The objective of the present study was to test the hypothesis that HBP is a key mediator of the increased endothelial permeability observed in sepsis and to test potential treatments that inhi

Accurate predictions of net ecosystem productivity (NEPc) of forest ecosystems are essential for climate change decisions and requirements in the context of national forest growth and greenhouse gas inventories. However, drivers and underlying mechanisms determining NEPc (e.g., climate and nutrients) are not entirely understood yet, particularly when considering the influence of past periods. Here

Introduction: Thrombin generation tests (TGTs) are considered to give more detailed information of the overall coagulation capability of a patient than clotting-based routine assays. The TGT thrombin generation assay-calibrated automated thrombogram (TGA-CAT) uses both platelet-poor plasma (PPP) and platelet-rich plasma (PRP). Assessing PRP gives more physiological test conditions and is of great

We present a biologically inspired model for estimating the position of a moving target that is invariant to the target's contrast. Our model produces a monotonic relationship between position and output activity using a divisive normalization between the 'receptive fields' of two overlapping, wide-field, small-target motion detector (STMD) neurons. These visual neurons found in flying insects, li