When on September 15, 2008 the financial conglomerate Lehman Brothers files for bankruptcy – and with that ‘officially’ sparks off the international financial crisis – few would have anticipated the invasive effect this crisis would come to have on the professional and personal lives of many across the world. Today, this implosion remains a mere ‘blip’ in the universe of events that ensued. On clo

In biomarker analysis, sample preparation plays a crucial step in order to extract, isolate and concentrate the analytes of interest. Among the various sample preparation techniques, solid phase extraction (SPE) is one of the most common and popular, due to the high enrichment factor, good recovery, low consumption of organic solvents and the possibility to automate (off- or on-line) the whole pro

Vi vet att laddade partiklar sänder ut elektromagnetisk strålning då de tvingas följa en krökt bana. Denna strålning kallas synkrotronstrålning, och upptäcktes i mitten av 1900-talet. Sedan dess har denna typ av strålning funnit tillämpningar inom flera forskningsområden såsom kemi, biologi, medicin och materialvetenskap. För att uppfylla de växande kraven på vissa strålningsegenskaper, är partikeIn this thesis several aspects related to a new generation of storage ring light sources are discussed. Due to a reduction of electron beam emittance, fourth generation storage rings provide synchrotron radiation sources close to the diffraction limit at X-ray wavelengths. This results in a significant increase in photon brightness that is beneficial in a variety of synchrotron radiation based exper

Background: Recent research has shown that acoustic white noise (80 dB) can improve task performance in people with attention deficits and/or Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). This is attributed to the phenomenon of stochastic resonance in which a certain amount of noise can improve performance in a brain that is not working at its optimum. We compare here the effect of noise exposu

Sweden is widely considered to have one of the most equal and gender-equal societies in the world. But the Swedish society is also one in which the Labour Court can find discrimination when a 60-year-old ‘Swedish’ ‘white’ woman fails to get a job interview – yet not when workers call a colleague of Gambian background ‘blackie’, ‘big black bastard’, ‘the African’, and ‘svartskalle’, or a man of Nig

Apolipoprotein A1 (apoA1) is the main protein component responsible for transportation of cholesterol on high-density lipoprotein (HDL). Serum amyloid A (SAA) is an acute phase protein associated with HDL. Apart from their physiological functions, both apoA1 and SAA have been identified as 'amyloidogenic peptides'. We report herein that the polysaccharide heparin interacts with both apoA1 and SAA

As part of a structural genomics platform in a university laboratory, a low-cost in-house-developed automated imaging system for SBS microplate experiments has been designed and constructed. The imaging system can scan a microplate in 2-6 min for a 96-well plate depending on the plate layout and scanning options. A web-based crystallization database system has been developed, enabling users to fol

Adenylate kinases (AKs) play important roles in nucleotide metabolism in all organisms and in cellular energetics by means of phosphotransfer networks in eukaryotes. The crystal structure of a human AK named AK6 was determined by in-house sulfur single-wavelength anomalous dispersion phasing methods and refined to 2.0-A resolution with a free R factor of 21.8%. Sequence analyses revealed that huma

In this article, the 2009 European League Against Rheumatism (EULAR) recommendations for the management of antineutrophil cytoplasmic antibody (ANCA)-associated vasculitis (AAV) have been updated. The 2009 recommendations were on the management of primary small and medium vessel vasculitis. The 2015 update has been developed by an international task force representing EULAR, the European Renal Ass

Novel experimental data, obtained recently using advanced multi-scale experiments, have been used to develop a micro-mechanically motivated constitutive model for amorphous glassy polymers. Taking advantage of the experiments, the model makes use of a microstructural deformation gradient to incorporate the experimentally obtained deformation of the microstructure, as well as its evolving orientati

Solvents are commonly used in pharmaceutical and cosmetic formulations and sanitary products and cleansers. The uptake of solvent into the skin may change the molecular organization of skin lipids and proteins, which may in turn alter the protective skin barrier function. We herein examine the molecular effects of 10 different solvents on the outermost layer of skin, the stratum corneum (SC), usin

Start with a graph with a subset of vertices called {\it the border}. A particle released from the origin performs a random walk on the graph until it comes to the immediate neighbourhood of the border, at which point it joins this subset thus increasing the border by one point. Then a new particle is released from the origin and the process repeats until the origin becomes a part of the border it

We consider consecutive random subdivision of polygons described as follows. Given an initial convex polygon with d≥3 edges, we choose a point at random on each edge, such that the proportions in which these points divide edges are i.i.d. copies of some random variable ξ. These new points form a new (smaller) polygon. By repeatedly implementing this procedure we obtain a sequence of random polygon