This paper is based on the session ‘Ecosystem services: a useful concept for soil policy making?’ at the Wageningen Applied Soil Conference in September 2011. In that session it was shown from different angles that policy awareness of the dependence of humankind on ecosystem services has resulted in the development of tools for optimal allocation and quantification of ecosystem services and raisin

Challengers, as opposed to defenders,of the status quo ascribe more negative motives for the attitudes of their opponentsand more positive motives to their allies. This may be associated with a heightened social cost involved in challenging the generally considered good and true. Most social issues are associated with ideology, and conservatives display more prejudices than liberals. Hence, it is

According to Tulving and Thomson (1973), similarity in encoding and recall contexts will facilitate recall. We investigated if similarity between the original voice event and the voice lineup helps people to identify the target from a voice lineup and helps improve the realism in participants' confidence judgments of the identification reports. Participants (n = 199) tried to identify a voice hear

Amyloid-beta (A beta) pathology is a major component in the mechanisms behind Alzheimer's disease (AD). Measurement of A beta(42) in cerebrospinal fluid predicts cognitive decline in patients with mild cognitive impairment and identifies AD in patients with dementia. However, studies on A beta in plasma are contradictory. In this prospective population-based study, plasma A beta(42) and A beta(40)

The spruce coneworm, Dioryctria abietella Denis & Schiffermüller (Lepidoptera: Pyralidae), is a major pest in spruce seed orchards in Europe. Initial work on its pheromone ecology reported significant attraction of males to (9Z,11E)-tetradecadienyl acetate (9Z,11E-14:OAc), but this compound appeared to be a very weak attractant in field trials. In this study, we show that a second female-produ

Genome-wide association (GWA) studies represent a powerful strategy for identifying susceptibility genes for complex diseases in human populations but results must be confirmed and replicated. Because of the close homology between mouse and human genomes, the mouse can be used to add evidence to genes suggested by human studies. We used the mouse quantitative trait loci (QTL) map to interpret resu

ABSTRACT Background We explored the impact of anastomotic leakage (AL) on the oncological outcome after anterior resection (AR) for rectal cancer which is still controversial.. Local recurrence (LR) and overall recurrenc(OAR) and cancer-specific survival were analysed. Method Patients undergoing AR for rectal cancer with a registered AL between 1995 and 1997 and a control group were identified in

Background: A reproducible standard for a graded allergen response in allergic rhinitis is lacking. The aim was to evaluate basophil allergen threshold sensitivity, CD-sens, as a diagnostic complement to nasal allergen challenge. Methods: Twenty-six patients with a history of allergic rhinitis due to grass pollen were intranasally challenged and nasal symptom score and peak nasal inspiratory flow

Recent studies have highlighted the involvement of rare (15,000 controls (p = 0.009). The discovery of apparent reduced penetrance of ASD in females bearing inherited autosomal SHANK1 deletions provides a possible contributory model for the male gender bias in autism. The data are also informative for clinical-genetics interpretations of both inherited and sporadic forms of ASD involving SHANK1.

Damsin (1) is a pseudoguaianolide sesquiterpene possessing potent biological activities, reported as a metabolite of several medicinal plants belonging to the genus Ambrosia together with related compounds. Starting from 1, which can be isolated in good amounts from Ambrosia arborescens, the five natural pseudoguaianolides ambrosin (2), isodamsin (3), 3 alpha-hydroxydamsin (4), 3 alpha-acetoxydams

BACKGROUND: A fracture in childhood is associated with low bone mineral density (BMD), but it is debated whether a fracture at growth also predicts low BMD in young adulthood. PURPOSE: To gender-specifically evaluate whether children with a fracture are at increased risk of low BMD in young adulthood. METHODS: Distal forearm BMD (g/cm(2) ) was measured with single photon absorptiometry (SPA) i

While the risk for arterial vascular disease has been shown to be influenced by socioeconomic status (SES), there is limited information whether SES also influences the risk for venous thromboembolism (VTE). To evaluate whether there is an association between SES and VTE incidence. In 1990, all 730,050 inhabitants (379,465 women and 350,585 men) above 25 years of age in the County of Skåne in Swed

Today, with many of the technological issues of integrated information management resolved (perhaps excluding the matter of interoperability), defining the content and status of BIM information deliveries remains both a practical and a theoretical problem. New BIM tools and new design processes and procedures have led to a certain confusion of what information is needed for particular BIM uses. Th

In a recent NJL article (Enger 2013), Hans-Olav Enger argues against some analyses of gender and ‘pancake sentences’, in particular against Josefsson (2009). In this short contribution, I will discuss what I take to be misunderstandings in Enger (2013). In addition I will discuss some data not included in Enger’s (2013) analysis, which I will show to be crucial for the comparison between the diffe

Blood pressure (BP) is a heritable determinant of risk for cardiovascular disease (CVD). To investigate genetic associations with systolic BP (SBP), diastolic BP (DBP), mean arterial pressure (MAP) and pulse pressure (PP), we genotyped 50 000 single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) that capture variation in 2100 candidate genes for cardiovascular phenotypes in 61 619 individuals of European ancestr

The innate immune factors controlling Candida albicans are mostly unknown. Vulvovaginal candidiasis is common in women and affects approximately 70-75% of all women at least once. Despite the propensity of Candida to colonize the vagina, transmission of Candida albicans following sexual intercourse is very rare. This prompted us to investigate whether the post coital vaginal milieu contained facto

This work describes a new diffusion MR framework for imaging and modeling of microstructure that we call q-space trajectory imaging (QTI). The QTI framework consists of two parts: encoding and modeling. First we propose q-space trajectory encoding, which uses time-varying gradients to probe a trajectory in q-space, in contrast to traditional pulsed field gradient sequences that attempt to probe a

Metastatic disease is responsible for most cancer deaths, and hematogenous spread through circulating tumor cells (CTC) is a prerequisite for tumor dissemination. CTCs may undergo epithelial–mesenchymal transition where many epithelial cell characteristics are lost. Therefore, CTC isolation systems relying on epithelial cell markers are at risk of losing important subpopulations of cells. Here, a