The paper provides a comprehensive empirical assessment of American stimulus policies aimed at renewable energy (RE) technologies. We use an indicator-based methodology to assess progress with respect to energy, environmental and socio-economic issues resulting from RE stimulus programs linked to the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, and review and analyze the emerging but scattered literatu

The exposure of bacterial cells to pulsed electric fields (PEF) leads to the reversible formation of pores in the cell membrane if an applied energy is below the critical level. Therefore, the effect of electric field pulses with amplitudes below 14 kV/cm and the applied energy up to 12.2 J/cm(3) on the growth of Lactobacillus plantarum 564 cells was investigated. After PEF treatments, the growth

The economic output of the dairy industry is to a great extent dependent on the processing of milk into other milk-based products such as cheese. The yield and quality of cheese are dependent on both the composition and technological properties of milk. The objective of this study was to evaluate the importance and effects of casein (CN) micelle size and milk composition on milk gelation character

Objective: The purpose of this study was to test the ability to discriminate low-frequency pure-tone stimuli for ears with and without contralateral dead regions, in subjects with bilateral high-frequency hearing loss; we examined associations between hearing loss characteristics and frequency discrimination of low-frequency stimuli in subjects with high-frequency hearing loss. Design: Cochlear de

Hippuric acid is synthesized and produced primarily by the gastrointestinal (GI) microflora. However, there is no known health benefit for hippuric acid except its catabolic conjugation of benzene-type compounds via glycine and subsequent excretion in the urine. For years the GI tract microflora were known to metabolize quinic acid to hippuric acid. Recently it was also proposed that DNA repair wa

An improved measurement of the mass of the Higgs boson is derived from a combined fit to the reconstructed invariant mass spectra of the decay channels H -> gamma gamma and H -> ZZ* -> 4l. The analysis uses the pp collision data sample recorded by the ATLAS experiment at the CERN Large Hadron Collider at center-of-mass energies of 7 TeV and 8 TeV, corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 25 fb

Faunal communities have been shaped in different ways by past climatic change. The impact of the termination of the last Glacial and the onset of the present (Holocene) Interglacial on large-scale faunal shifts, extinction dynamics and gene pools of species are of special interest in natural sciences. A general pattern of climate-triggered range expansion and local extinction of vertebrate species

In embedded real-time systems, task priorities are often assigned to meet deadlines. However, in control tasks, a late completion of a task has no catastrophic consequence. Rather, it has a quantifiable impact in the control performance achieved by the task. In this paper, we address the problem of determining the optimal assignment of priorities and periods of sampled-data control tasks that run

Background: Interactions between Th1 and Th2 immune responses are of importance to the onset and development of allergic disorders. A Toll-like receptor 7 agonist such as AZD8848 may have potential as a treatment for allergic airway disease by skewing the immune system away from a Th2 profile. Objective: To evaluate the efficacy and safety of intranasal AZD8848. Methods: In a placebo-controlled si

To investigate whether early coronary angiography (CAG) after out-of-hospital cardiac arrest of a presumed cardiac cause is associated with improved outcomes in patients without acute ST elevation.

Producing more food per unit of water has never been as important as it is at present, and the demand for water by economic sectors other than agriculture will necessarily put a great deal of pressure on a dwindling resource, leading to a call for increases in the productivity of water in agriculture. This topic has been given high priority in the research agenda for the last 30 years, but with th

This paper takes inspiration from the field of bio-mimicry to suggest what a plant biosecurity system might look like if it was modelled on the human immune system. We suggest structural and institutional changes to current biosecurity systems that would facilitate adaptive preparation and response policies, focusing particularly on the Australian plant biosecurity system. By improving information

Key points Myocardial infarction patients have altered platelet miRNA profilesActivated platelets release miRNAs that can be taken up by endothelial cells and regulate ICAM1 gene expression.

Abstract in UndeterminedPrevious research on antonyms has shown that some pairings form more felicitous couplings than others. Following up on that research, we conducted two semantic categorization experiments using Event Related Potentials to establish whether there are neurophysiological differences related to levels of antonym canonicity. In Experiment 1, the members of canonical antonym pairs

Often in clinical practice, a diagnosis of alcohol dependence or abuse does not provide enough information to establish an adequate treatment plan. Hence, multidimensional instruments have been constructed better to describe the extent and character of a patient's alcohol problem. The purpose of the current article is to present the AVI-R2, a self-report test that provides a standardized and diffe

The purpose of this paper is to present a novel combined design of the voltage source converter–high voltage direct current (VSC-HVDC) and the power system stabilizer (PSS) controllers to obtain a better dynamical response. The proposed technique is applied to enhance the damping of the power system low-frequency oscillations (LFOs) and results are compared with traditional design. A fuzzy logic c

This paper verified the macro-to-mini-scale criterion BoRe10.5=200 because data points where BoRe10.5≤200 and BoRe10.5>200 show very different trends for the entire database (1672 data points). Boiling number at critical heat flux (Blchf) decreases greatly with heated length-to-diameter ratio (Lh/dhe) when Lh/dhe is small while a relatively smooth trend occurs with large Lh/dhe values. The paper p

Lower visibility of female scientists, compared to male scientists, is a potential reason for the under-representation of women among senior academic ranks. Visibility in the scientific community stems partly from presenting research as an invited speaker at organized meetings. We analysed the sex ratio of presenters at the European Society for Evolutionary Biology (ESEB) Congress 2011, where all

External electric field is incorporated into the generalized Mulliken-Hush model and Marcus theory. With this new development, we have investigated the field-dependent electronic structure and rate of photoinduced charge transfer in organic donor-acceptor dyad using time-dependent density functional theory and extensive multidimensional visualization techniques. The model is used to evaluate the i

Immune defense may vary as a result of trade-offs with other life-history traits or in parallel with variation in antigen levels in the environment. We studied lark species (Alaudidae) in the Arabian Desert and temperate Netherlands to test opposing predictions from these two hypotheses. Based on their slower pace of life, the trade-off hypothesis predicts relatively stronger immune defenses in de