The overall aim of this PhD thesis was to investigate sedimentary micro-environments and ecosystemfunctioning of two coastal areas. We combined different high spatial resolution methods and multivariate analyses atdifferent spatio-temporal scales to reveal interactions between benthic faunal and geochemical compartments. Firstly,we investigated two stations with contrasted oxygen, nitrate and mang

Background: Laryngoscopy is a difficult skill to acquire and maintain and even more so by less frequent users. Numerous studies have compared limitations of direct laryngoscopic (DL) and video-assisted laryngoscopic (VL) techniques for endotracheal intubation in different scenarios, but individual retention over time of intubation skills with either technique has, to our knowledge, never been repo

Rosemary Hakim won the first Miss Lebanon-America beauty pageant in 1954. While the pageant celebrated the Lebanese American community in the US, Hakim’s strategic use of her new representative status allowed her to go beyond the organizer’s intentions. She contacted the Lebanese government and secured an invitation to Beirut, which propelled her into the middle of US Cold War politics and cultura

We prove a bijective unitary correspondence between (1) the isospectral torus of almost-periodic, absolutely continuous CMV matrices having fixed finite-gap spectrum E and (2) special periodic block-CMV matrices satisfying a Magic Formula. This latter class arises as E-dependent operator Möbius transforms of certain generating CMV matrices that are periodic up to a rotational phase; for this reaso

Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) is a complex disease that leads to motor neuron death. Despite heritability estimates of 52%, genome-wide association studies (GWASs) have discovered relatively few loci. We developed a machine learning approach called RefMap, which integrates functional genomics with GWAS summary statistics for gene discovery. With transcriptomic and epigenetic profiling of mot

Objectives/Hypothesis: The aims were to determine health-related quality of life (HRQoL), including voice problems, dysphagia, depression, and anxiety after total laryngectomy (TL), and investigate the associations between HRQoL and the late effects. Study Design: Cross-sectional study. Methods: 172 participants having received a TL 1.6 to 18.1 years ago for laryngeal/hypopharyngeal cancer filled

The chapter provides a historic overview of the research in physics and chemistry for the development of radionuclides, radiopharmaceuticals, and instrumentation which have had a major impact for the today’s status of nuclear medicine. During the first half of the 20th century in particular, a number of researchers with relevance to the development of nuclear medicine have been awarded the Nobel P

Objective: To describe the clinical and ultrasound characteristics of three types of rare malignant ovarian germ cell tumor: embryonal carcinoma, non-gestational choriocarcinoma and malignant mixed germ cell tumor. Methods: This was a retrospective multicenter study. From the International Ovarian Tumor Analysis (IOTA) database, we identified patients with a histological diagnosis of ovarian embry

OBJECTIVE: Parathyroid adenomas frequently harbour deletions of genomic DNA at chromosome regions 1p, 6q and 11q. In this study we related clinical characteristics in 56 patients with primary hyperparathyroidism (pHPT) to loss of heterozygosity (LOH) in these chromosome regions.DESIGN: LOH analysis was performed on 56 sporadic parathyroid tumours using a total of 18 microsatellite markers for chro

This open issue is published against the background of a major global pandemic. The old ‘normal’ seems far away and undesirable, as a socio-ecological transformation becomes even more urgent. The contributions featured here scrutinize the current trends in the capitalist mode of production and envision the alternative organization of our societies. They examine new configurations of work, to which

Background: Pesticides and metals may disrupt thyroid function, which is key to fetal brain development. Objectives: To evaluate if current-use pesticide exposures, lead and excess manganese alter free thyroxine (FT4), free triiodothyronine (FT3), and thyroid stimulating hormone (TSH) concentrations in pregnant women from the Infants' Environmental Health Study (ISA). Methods: At enrollment, we de

We propose a capacitance measurement scheme that enables quantitative characterization of ferroelectric thin films integrated onsemiconductors. The film defect density is estimated by measurements of the CV hysteresis and frequency dispersion, whereas importantdevice parameters such as memory window and endurance can be extracted by a unidirectional CV method. The simple measurementscheme and the

Aims: Because evidence regarding risk stratification predicting prognosis of patients with heart failure (HF) decompensation attended in primary care is lacking, we developed and externally validated a model to forecast death/hospitalization during the first 30 days after an episode of decompensation. The predictive model is based on variables easily obtained in primary care settings. Methods and

Graph neural networks for crystal structures typically use the atomic positions and the atomic species as input. Unfortunately, this information is not available when predicting new materials, for which the precise geometrical information is unknown. We circumvent this problem by replacing the precise bond distances with embeddings of graph distances. This allows our networks to be applied directl

Mohja Kahf’s novel the girl in the tangerine scarf highlights a broad spectrum of Muslim feminist agencies. In this essay I look at how her literary representations negotiate religious and feminist discourses in doing so. I further argue that her focus on empowerment through self-defined spirituality and religion sets her novel apart within the canon of contemporary Arab American literature, as mo