This article discusses whether the poorest and most indebted countries receive aid in the form of grants rather than loans, by studying bilateral aid flows to low- and middle-income countries between 1975 and 2005. The empirical analysis finds no evidence that more indebted countries receive a higher grant component, but it does show that poorer countries receive a significantly higher grant compo

The 'trade-off' hypothesis for virulence evolution assumes that between-host transmission rate is a positive and saturating function of pathogen exploitation and virulence, but there are as yet few tests of this assumption, in particular for vector-borne pathogens. Here, I show that the infectivity (probability of transmission) of the tick-borne bacterium Borrelia afzelii from two of its natural r

The gist of many (NP-)hard combinatorial problems is to decide whether a universe of n elements contains a witness consisting of k elements that match some prescribed pattern. For some of these problems there are known advanced algebra-based FPT algorithms which solve the decision problem but do not return the witness. We investigate techniques for turning such a YES/NO-decision oracle into an alg

This study has two goals: Firstly, to give an account of the semantic organization of individually used antonymic adjectives in discourse, and secondly, based on these finding, and previous work on antonymic meanings, contribute to a comprehensive theoretical account of their representation within the framework of Cognitive Linguistics. The hypothesis is that the members of the pairs are used in t

A search for supersymmetry (SUSY) in events with large missing transverse momentum, jets, at least one hadronically decaying tau lepton and zero or one additional light leptons (electron/muon), has been performed using 20.3 fb(-1) of proton-proton collision data at root s = 8 TeV recorded with the ATLAS detector at the Large Hadron Collider. No excess above the Standard Model background expectatio

Metastability and phase coexistence are important concepts in colloidal science. Typically, the phase diagram of colloidal systems is considered at the equilibrium without the presence of an external field. However, several studies have reported phase transition under mechanical deformation. The reason behind phase coexistence under shear flow is not fully understood. Here, multilamellar vesicle (

In this paper, we study the time-of-arrival (TOA) based self-calibration problem of dual-microphone array for known and unknown rack distance, and also for different combinations of dimension for the affine spaces spanned by the receivers and by the senders. Particularly, we analyze the minimum cases and present minimum solvers for the case of microphones and speakers in 3-D/3-D, in 2-D/3-D, and i

Factor I (FI) is a serine protease that inhibits all complement pathways by degrading activated complement components C3b and C4b. FI functions only in the presence of several cofactors such as factor H, C4b-binding protein, complement receptor 1 and membrane cofactor protein. FI is composed of two chains linked by a disulphide bridge; the light chain comprises only the serine protease (SP) domain

Migraine is a paroxysmal, disabling primary headache that affects 16 % of the adult population. In spite of decades of intense research, the origin and the pathophysiology mechanisms involved are still not fully known. Although triptans and gepants provide effective relief from acute migraine for many patients, their site of action remains unidentified. It has been suggested that during migraine a

In industrialised countries atopic dermatitis (AD) is the most common chronic inflammatory disease among children. Many factors influence this disease in a negative way and contact allergy is one such factor. The aim of the study was to examine the frequency of contact allergy among children with the diagnosis AD in Malmö, Sweden and to evaluate if a significant degree of contact allergies in thes

MADEIRA was a Collaborative Project cofunded by the European Commission through the EURATOM Seventh Research Framework Programme. It was structured into four scientific work packages, and its aim was to optimize the efficacy and safety of 3D functional imaging in nuclear medicine and thereby to reduce the radiation exposures of the patients while keeping or even improving the quality of the diagno

This study aims to theorize more concretely the micro-foundations of reform strategies with attention to the role of would-be reform winners in motivating strategy choice. The theory incorporates insights about multidimensional preferences into Weaver’s framework and builds on a growing literature on the framing of welfare state change in order to hypothesize that governments may face a vote-seeki

Interleukin-16 (IL-16) functions as a regulator of T-cell growth and acts as an inducer of cell migration. The aim of this study was to determine whether IL-16 measured in human carotid plaques was associated with symptoms (eg, stroke, transient ischemic attack, or amaurosis fugax), markers of plaque stability, and postoperative cardiovascular events.

We study functions generating Gabor Riesz bases on the integer lattice. The classical Balian-Low theorem (BLT) restricts the simultaneous time and frequency localization of such functions. We obtain a quantitative estimate on their Zak transform that extends both this result and the more general (p,q) Balian-Low theorem. Moreover, we establish a family of quantitative amalgam-type Balian-Low theor

Angiogenesis is a target in the treatment of ovarian cancer. Nintedanib, an oral triple angiokinase inhibitor of VEGF receptor, platelet-derived growth factor receptor, and fibroblast growth factor receptor, has shown activity in phase 2 trials in this setting. We investigated the combination of nintedanib with standard carboplatin and paclitaxel chemotherapy in patients with newly diagnosed advan

China’s unbalanced growth strategy has seemingly fostered growing inter-regional growth disparities and there is little evidence of wealth trickling down from richer provinces to poorer provinces. Standard convergence tests, however, may be ill specified to detect underlying long-term growth trends in small samples due to the pronounced and frequent inter-regional short-term fluctuations. Our pape