There is an urgent need of improving the lives of 100 million slum dwellers until year 2020. The Habitat Agenda has identified self-help housing among other enabling housing strategies. This paper focuses on mapping organizations and different types of organized self-help housing (OSHH) projects since year 2000 with the aim of analyzing important lessons from practice. An international survey was

The present invention describes a method for the treatment of tall oil pitch (TOP), said method comprising heating the TOP and optionally additives including water and steam to a temperature of at least 300°C; maintaining the temperature in the reactor at 300°C or higher for a period of time to enable thermal treatment of the TOP to act on components thereof toproduce fatty acids and/or rosin acid

Populärvetenskaplig sammanfattning Främsta källan till läkemedel i miljön är att vi människor inte bryter ner det vi stoppar i oss och att avloppsreningsverk inte heller helt eliminerar resterna i reningsprocessen. Koncentrationerna i naturen är dock ofta låga men vattenlevande organismer kan ackumulera vissa läkemedel så koncentrationen i deras kroppar blir högre än i omgivningen, så kallad bioacPharmaceuticals are found at low concentrations (ng/L) in aquatic environments but bioaccumulation may result in aquatic organisms reaching internal effect levels (µg/L). Environmental hazard assessments include standardized bioaccumulation tests but contrary to the model substances around which the frameworks are built most pharmaceuticals are designed to mimic endogenic chemicals, ionizable, and

Macroporous cryogels for capturing cisplatin were synthesized by cryogelation polymerization of methacrylic acid and 2-hydroxyethyl metacrylate. The cryogel materials exhibited good mechanical property, high swelling ratio and high affinity for cisplatin, with an adsorption capacity of up to 150 mg cisplatin per gram of cryogel. The correlation between the capacity of the cryogel and the monomer c

Objectives: The purpose of this study was to analyse associations between sexual orientation and poor psychological health. Study design: This was a cross-sectional study. Methods: The 2012 public health survey in Scania, Southern Sweden, is a cross-sectional population-based study with 28,029 participants aged 18–80 years. Logistic regression analyses were performed. Results: The prevalence of po

Digitally animated characters are promising tools in research studying how we integrate information from speech and visual sources such as gestures because they allow specific gesture features to be manipulated in isolation. We present an approach combining motion capture and 3D-animated characters that allows us to manipulate natural individual gesture strokes for experimental purposes, for examp

Millipedes are a species-rich and ancient arthropod clade which typically bear a pair of lateral compound eyes with a small number of large facets. To understand the visual tasks that underlie the evolution of millipede eyes, their spatial resolving performance is of key importance. We here investigate the spatial resolution of the millipede Cylindroiulus punctatus using behavioural assays. Indivi

Genetic and environmental factors both contribute to the development of Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) and Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). One suggested environmental risk factor for ASD and ADHD is air pollution, but knowledge of its effects, especially in low-exposure areas, are limited. Here, we investigate risks for ASD and ADHD associated with prenatal exposure to air polluti

This review, devoted to the memory of Kåre Larsson, deals with surfactant and lipid self-assembly. The focus is on the crucial role of NMR techniques in the understanding, at a molecular level, molecular dynamics and microstructure. The strength of NMR self-diffusion in determining size and shape of supramolecular aggregates as well as microstructural features, in terms of water-in-oil, oil-in-wat

This review aims to highlight the importance of saccades during locomotion as a strategy to reduce sensory information loss while the subject is moving. Acquiring sensory data from the environment during movement results in a temporal flow of information, as the sensory precept changes with the position of the observer. Accordingly, the movement pattern shapes the sensory flow. Therefore, the requ

Crop production often comes at the expense of losses in ecosystem services and biodiversity; however, this might not always be the case. Here we test the effects of shade gradients and agricultural inputs on trade-offs or synergies between coffee yield and ecosystem services and biodiversity data for smallholder coffee plantations of Arabica coffee in Peru. We collected data using surveys (n = 162

BACKGROUND: The optimal prime solution for the cardiopulmonary bypass (CPB) circuit in adult cardiac surgery has not yet been defined. Mannitol is widely used in the priming solution for CPB despite the fact that there is no clear consensus on the role of mannitol in cardiac surgery. The aim of this study was to investigate the effect of mannitol in the CPB prime solution. METHODS: This prospectiv

PURPOSE: To investigate the prognostic impact of body size changes during the first postoperative year in breast cancer. METHODS: A cohort of 1,317 primary breast cancer patients included in Sweden (2002-2014) underwent body size measurements at the preoperative and 1-year visits (n = 1,178). Landmark survival analyses were used to investigate how postoperative weight gain or loss (> 5%) or change

Physical activity has been proposed to be beneficial for prevention of depression, although the importance of exercise intensity, sex-specific mechanisms, and duration of the effects need to be clarified. Using an observational study design, following 395,369 individuals up to 21 years we studied whether participation in an ultralong-distance cross-country ski race was associated with lower risk o

OBJECTIVES: Primary graft dysfunction is a severe form of acute lung injury and a major cause of early morbidity and mortality encountered after lung transplant.We used a customized PExA 2.0 instrument (PExA, Gothenburg, Sweden) to measure particle flow in exhaled air during mechanical ventilation in the intensive care unit. Our objective was to discover whether patients who developed primary graf

This work focuses on the optimization of the Nuclear Reaction Analysis (NRA) technique to determine the content of lithium and fluorine in geological materials. Measuring low concentration of these isotopes is of great relevance in many fields such as geological, astrophysical, biological and material sciences. Light elements as lithium and fluorine are considered as geochemical tracers in various

OBJECTIVES: To examine the association between workload and kidney injury in a fieldworker cohort with different levels of physically demanding work over a sugarcane harvest, and to assess whether the existing heat prevention efforts at a leading occupational safety and health programme are sufficient to mitigate kidney injury. METHODS: Biological and questionnaire data were collected before (n=54

For studies of how birds control their altitude, seabirds are of particular interest because they forage offshore where the visual environment can be simply modelled by a flat world textured by waves then generating only ventral visual cues. This study suggests that optic flow, i.e. the rate at which the sea moves across the eye's retina, can explain gulls' altitude control over seas. In particula