Coagulation, complement, and innate immunity are tightly interwoven and form an alliance that can be traced back to early eukaryotic evolution. Here we employed an ecoimmunological approach using Tissue Factor Pathway Inhibitor (TFPI)-1-derived peptides from the different classes of vertebrates (i.e. fish, reptile, bird, and mammals) and tested whether they can boost killing of various human bacte

An approach to reduce CO2 emissions while simultaneously keeping the soot emissions down from compression ignition (CI) engines is to blend in short chained oxygenates into the fuel. In this work, two oxygenated fuel blends consisting of diesel, biodiesel and EtOH in the ratio of 68:17:15 and 58:14:30 has been utilized and studied in a single cylinder light duty (LD) CI engine in terms of efficien

Register-based studies have indicated that men with impaired fertility are at higher risk for developing various adult-onset diseases than fertile men. The majority of men undergoing ICSI treatment are sub-fertile and since they are in contact with the health care system, these men are well suited as target for preventive measures. Our study included all men (N = 459 766) who had fathered children

The plant shoot apical meristem holds a stem cell niche from which all aerial organs originate. Using a computational approach we show that a mixture of monomers and heterodimers of the transcription factors WUSCHEL and HAIRY MERISTEM is sufficient to pattern the stem cell niche, and predict that immobile heterodimers form a regulatory “pocket” surrounding the stem cells. The model achieves to rep

Type 2 diabetes mellitus is characterized by a low-grade inflammation; however, mechanisms leading to this inflammation in specific tissues are not well understood. The eye can be affected by diabetes; thus, we hypothesized that inflammatory changes in the eye may parallel the inflammation that develops with diabetes. Here, we developed a non-invasive means to monitor the status of inflammatory de

Background The use of natural gas has increased in the last years. In the future, its import supply and transport structure will diversify (longer distances, higher share of LNG (liquefied natural gas), new pipelines). Thus the process chain and GHG emissions of the production, processing, transport and distribution might change. Simultaneously, the injection of bio methane into the natural gas gr

The Russian natural gas industry is the world's largest producer and transporter of natural gas. This paper aims to characterize the methane emissions from Russian natural gas transmission operations, to explain projects to reduce these emissions, and to characterize the role of emissions reduction within the context of current GHG policy. It draws on the most recent independent measurements at al

The Learning with Errors problem (LWE) has become a central topic in recent cryptographic research. In this paper, we present a new solving algorithm combining important ideas from previous work on improving the Blum-Kalai-Wasserman (BKW) algorithm and ideas from sieving in lattices. The new algorithm is analyzed and demonstrates an improved asymptotic performance. For the Regev parameters $q=n^2$

Parkinson's disease (PD) is a progressive neurodegenerative disorder associated with increasing disability and limitations in performance of activities of daily living (ADL) despite availability of effective symptomatic therapy. Following an overview of classical test theory (CTT) and Rasch measurement theory (RMT), the case of a clinical PD trial aiming to demonstrate ADL improvements by using th

Programming robots for tasks involving force interaction is difficult, since both the knowledge of the task and the dynamics of the robots are necessary. An immersive haptic interface for task demonstration is proposed, where theoperator can sense and act through the robot. This is achieved by coupling two robotic systems with virtual constraints such that they have the same coordinates in the ope

The Chinese government has launched a guideline to lead power plants to more suitable technological pathways for meeting the strict “ultra-low emission” (“ULE”) standards to reduce air pollution emissions of the coal-fired power industry. Considering the complex interrelations between water, energy and emission, a quantifiable method of choosing the feasible technology sets for 6 multi-objective o

The objective was to provide a clinical setup for photoacoustic imaging (PAI) of the temporal artery in humans and to describe the challenges encountered and methods of overcoming them. The temporal artery was examined in 7 patients with suspect giant cell arteritis (GCA), both in vivo and ex vivo, and the results were compared to that of histology. To adapt PAI to human studies, the transducer wa

Purpose: The primary goal was to validate a Danish translated version of the Catquest-9SF by Rasch analysis. The secondary goal was to investigate whether preoperative Catquest-9SF scores, best-corrected visual acuity, comorbidity, gender, age or corneal astigmatism could predict improvements in subjective outcome. Methods: In a prospective trial, 250 patients eligible for cataract surgery were in

Different perceptions of the concept of extended producer responsibility and product stewardship (EPR/PS) have tended to lead to prolonged policy disputes and have likely affected the design of EPR/PS policies. We therefore surveyed stakeholders’ perceptions of the concept of EPR/PS, including its aims, application, and rationales, and analyzed 376 responses with regression analysis and cluster an

In this paper, we study sliding window decoding of braided convolutional codes (BCCs) in the context of a streaming application, where decoder error propagation can be a serious problem. A window extension algorithm and a resynchronization mechanism are introduced to mitigate the effect of error propagation. In addition, we introduce a soft bit-error-rate stopping rule to reduce computational comp

In a previous study, we showed that the Ly6G(-)CD11b(+) blood monocytes residing in naïve mice are intrinsically immunosuppressive and that loss of this suppressive function may contribute to the development of autoimmunity in experimental autoimmune encephalomyelitis (EAE), a murine model of human multiple sclerosis. Here we report that mice treated with a modified superantigen coupled to myelin