Lignin, the second most abundant natural polymer, has emerged as a potential alternative material to petroleum-based chemicals and renewable resource for the production of diverse forms of aromatics, biofuels, and bio-based materials. Thus, it is becoming important to understand its structure and properties to provide key features and insights for better/efficient lignin valorisation. In this work

The main question that guides this paper is how governments are focusing (and must focus) on competence building (education and training) when designing and implementing innovation policies. With this approach, the paper aims at filling the gap between the existing literature on competences on the one hand, and the real world of innovation policy-making on the other, typically not speaking to each

Aeolian dunes, coversands, glacifluvial deltas and paraglacial mass-movement deposits in Bonäsheden and Skattungheden in Dalarna, central Sweden were dated by optically stimulated luminescence (OSL) on quartz. The OSL ages confirm that the majority of the dunes started forming directly after deglaciation, as suggested by previous investigators. Dune formation seems to have lasted at least 1500 yea

Over the past decade pro-poor agricultural growth strategies intended to raise smallholder productivity and increase commercialization among smallholders have been put forth as the key method for addressing poverty in rural Africa. By contrast perspectives that challenge this model question the market optimism and presumptions of higher smallholder efficiency that underpin the pro-poor agricultura

Given a compact set of real numbers, a random Cm + α-diffeomorphism is constructed such that the image of any measure concentrated on the set and satisfying a certain condition involving a real number s, almost surely has Fourier dimension greater than or equal to s/ (m+ α). This is used to show that every Borel subset of the real numbers of Hausdorff dimension s is Cm + α-equivalent to a set of F

Background and aims Barley kernel based products have been shown to induce benefits on blood glucose regulation, cardio-metabolic risk markers and appetite regulating hormones in a time perspective of 11–16 h after intake. The mechanisms have been assigned to gut fermentation of indigestible carbohydrates. The purpose of the present study was to evaluate if the modulatory effects of barley on mark

As part of a long-term project investigating the relevance of phenomenology for (cognitive) linguistics we analyse two central, interrelated concepts: embodied intersubjectivity (intercorporeality) and sedimentation. With respect to the first, we spell out a number of different intercorporeal structures, emanating at the most fundamental level from the dual Leibkörper nature of the body. Further,

Because of remarkable advances in the treatment of preterm birth, physicians increasingly encounter adult patients who were born preterm. However, research now shows that improved early survival may come at the expense of future health risks, including increased respiratory, cardiovascular, and kidney disease, diabetes and metabolic syndrome, and neuropsychiatric disorders. Unfortunately, this kno

This paper presents the process and results of a set of studies within the ABBI EU project, with the general aim to co-design wearable technology (an audio bracelet) together with visually impaired children, starting at a young age. The authors discuss user preferences related to sounds and tactile materials and present the results of a focus group with very young visually-impaired children under

Quick-clay landslides are a serious geohazard in Canada, Norway and Sweden. Identification and mapping of quick clays are essential endeavours because the damage caused by an individual landslide can be large and costly, with potentially fatal consequences. We collected geophysical borehole and soil core data from an area prone to quick-clay landslides in southwestern Sweden. Methodologies include

This study investigated whether isothermal calorimetry measurements on cement paste are sufficiently accurate and precise to partially replace compressive strengths measurements on cement mortar as a quality control method at cement production. The study was also designed to provide information on mechanisms that will affect the relationship between heat of hydration and early strength, but not to

Multi-atlas segmentation has become a frequently used tool for medical image segmentation due to its outstanding performance. A computational bottleneck is that all atlas images need to be registered to a new target image. In this paper, we propose an intermediate representation of the whole atlas set – an überatlas – that can be used to speed up the registration process. The representation consis

Parkinson's disease (PD) is a neurodegenerative disease where the degeneration of the nigrostriatal pathway leads to specific motor deficits. There is an unmet medical need for regenerative treatments that stop or reverse disease progression. Several growth factors have been investigated in clinical trials to restore the dopaminergic nigrostriatal pathway damaged in PD. Platelet-derived growth fac

This paper has been aimed at implementing and validating a simplified environmental feedback fire model in FDS as a complement to more advanced pyrolysis models. The two main means of environmental feedback have been identified as the oxygen concentration close to the fuel base and the radiative feedback from the surrounding obstructions and smoke layer. The oxygen concentration at the fuel base h

Long-term genetic data from intensively monitored natural populations are important for understanding how effective population sizes (N e) can vary over time. We therefore genotyped 1622 common buzzard (Buteo buteo) chicks sampled over 12 consecutive years (2002-2013 inclusive) at 15 microsatellite loci. This data set allowed us to both compare single-sample with temporal approaches and explore te

In this paper, we cast the idea of antithetic sampling, widely used in standard Monte Carlo simulation, into the framework of sequential Monte Carlo methods. We propose a version of the standard auxiliary particle filter where the particles are mutated blockwise in such a way that all particles within each block are, first, offspring of a common ancestor and, second, negatively correlated conditio