Objective: The vagina makes a major contribution to the normal female sexual response cycle. An increase in vaginal blood flow is considered a key event in the mechanism of sexual arousal. Recent research has focused mainly on the cyclic GMP pathway and phosphodiesterase type 5 (PDE5, cyclic GMP specific PDE) in the control of vaginal vascular smooth muscle, whereas only little is known on the rol

Theoretical arguments, supported by other indirect evidence, suggest that the wave function of high-x partons should be narrower than that of low-x ones. In this article, we present a modification to the variable impact parameter framework of PYTHIA 8 to model this effect. In particular, a Gaussian hadronic matter profile is introduced, with a width dependent on the x value of the constituent bein

Gaia, the next astrometric mission of the European Space Agency, will use a camera composed of 106 CCDs to collect multiple observations for one billion stars. The astrometric core solution of Gaia will use the estimated location of the stellar images on the CCDs to derive the astrometric parameters (position, parallax and proper motion) of the stars. The Gaia CCDs will suffer from charge transfer

Abstract in UndeterminedEmployees working across multiple cultures are exposed to a vast number of different norms and values, and consequentially work is often a struggle to retain a coherent sense of self. However, when international workers travel, they also encounter more bland spaces where familiarity and similarity are important. These spaces appear culturally generic to the Western traveler

In a recent article Emanuel Adler and Vincent Pouliot argued that attention to 'practices' could help IR scholars overcome ontological gaps and provide a new basis, on which the discipline could be established. Four such dichotomies are particularly salient: between the material and the meaningful, the rational and the practical, between agencies and structures, and between the forces of stability

CHEP Conferences are dedicated to a quite specific scientific computing domain, and deal with rather specialised software, developed for the needs of the High Energy Physics community. The sheer size of this community created an environment which until recently has been to a large extent isolated from the mainstream computing. There is however an emerging trend for the computing solutions to spill

Background: Hemophilia A (HA) has a high level of variation within the disease class, with more than 1000 mutations being listed in the HAMSTeRS database. At the same time a number of F8 mutations are present in specific populations at high frequencies. Objectives: The simultaneous presence of large numbers of rare mutations and a small number of high-frequency mutations raises questions about the

Changes in solar activity have previously been proposed to cause decadal- to millennial-scale fluctuations in both the modern and Holocene climates(1). Direct observational records of solar activity, such as sunspot numbers, exist for only the past few hundred years, so solar variability for earlier periods is typically reconstructed from measurements of cosmogenic radionuclides such as Be-10 and

Hemicelluloses recovered by alkaline extraction of wheat bran can be isolated and purified by ultrafiltration and used to produce high-value products such as barrier films for food packaging. The flux during ultrafiltration depends to a large extent on the pretreatment of the solution. It has been shown previously that dead-end filtration with kieselguhr can increase the flux during ultrafiltratio

Little is known about the size selectivity of cod in static fishing gears such as pots and traps. In this field study, floating fishing pots were equipped with 40, 45 and 50 mm square mesh escape windows in order to estimate the size selectivity of cod at different mesh sizes. Relationships between selectivity parameters and mesh size, as well as an optimal mesh size for the escape window with res

We recently demonstrated that recombinant adeno-associated viral vector-induced hippocampal overexpression of neuropeptide Y receptor, Y2, exerts a seizure-suppressant effect in kindling and kainate-induced models of epilepsy in rats. Interestingly, additional overexpression of neuropeptide Y in the hippocampus strengthened the seizure-suppressant effect of transgene Y2 receptors. Here we show for

We apply a panel of 331 microfinance institutions from 37 countries to investigate the relationship between social beliefs and microfinance financial performance over the period of 2003-2011. We find that microfinance institutions in countries with higher levels of trust and more collectivist culture have lower operating and default costs and charge lower interest rates. These results provide the

The ATLAS detector at the Large Hadron Collider is used to search for high-mass resonances decaying to an electron-positron pair or a muon-antimuon pair. The search is sensitive to heavy neutral Z' gauge bosons, Randall-Sundrum gravitons, Z* bosons, techni-mesons, Z/gamma bosons, and bosons predicted by Torsion models. Results are presented based on an analysis of pp collisions at a center-of-mass

Regional climate modeling is a dynamical downscaling technique applied to the results of global climate models (GCMs) in order to acquire more information on climate simulations and climate change projections. GCMs and regional climate models (RCMs) have undergone considerable development over the past few decades, and both have increased in resolution. The higher-resolution edge of RCMs compared

In the genome of Artiodactyla (cow, sheep, pigs, camels, and whales), a major retroposon group originated from a presumable horizontal transfer of BovB, a retrotransposon-like element retroposon, between 52 and 70 million years ago. Since then, BovB retroposons have proliferated and today occupy a quarter of the cow's genome sequence. The BovB-related short interspersed elements (SINEs) were used

For electric and hybrid vehicles that use grid power to charge the battery, traction circuit components are not normally engaged during the charging time; hence, there is a possibility of using the traction circuit components in the charger circuit to have an onboard integrated charger. An isolated high-power integrated charger based on a special electrical machine with a double set of stator wind

Thymus colonisation and thymocyte positioning are regulated by interactions between CCR7 and CCR9, and their respective ligands, CCL19/CCL21 and CCL25. The ligands of CCR7 and CCR9 also interact with the atypical receptor CCRL1 (also known as ACKR4), which is expressed in the thymus and has recently been reported to play an important role in normal alpha beta T-cell development. Here, we show that

Abstract in Undetermined Given an undirected graph g(V, E), a set of traffic matrices H and one additional traffic matrix h, we say that H totally dominates h if, for each capacity reservation u supporting H, u also supports h using the same routing pattern. It has been shown that if vertical bar H vertical bar = 1 = (H = {(h) over cap}, say) and g, is a complete graph, H totally dominates h if, a