Background International multicentre studies on diet and cancer are relatively new in epidemiological research. They offer a series of challenging methodological issues for the evaluation of the association between dietary exposure and disease outcomes, which can both be quite heterogeneous across different geographical regions. This requires considerable work to standardize dietary measurements a

Using Cholesky decomposition and density fitting to approximate the electron repulsion integrals, an implementation of the complete active space self-consistent field (CASSCF) method suitable for large-scale applications is presented. Sample calculations on benzene, diaquo-tetra-mu-acetato-dicopper(II), and diuraniumendofullerene demonstrate that the Cholesky and density fitting approximations all

This study investigated the degree of realism in the confidence judgments of 11 to 12-year-olds (41 girls and 40 boys) of their answers to questions relating to a short film clip showing a kidnapping event. Four different confidence scales were used: a numeric scale, a picture scale, a line scale and a written scale. The results demonstrated that the children showed a high level of overconfidence

Using the polymerase chain reaction (PCR), we designed a study concept to evaluate the safety of plasma derivatives in previously treated patients who are non-infected by the specific viruses studied. Several product lots can be studied in a single patient, with a study period for each lot of 3 months. In the present study 19 patients were included for treatment with Baxter Hyland Immuno's PCR-scr

The objective of this study was to analyze the accumulated effects of leaching in two test roads were municipal solid waste incineration (MSWI) bottom ash and aggregate from a railway embankment, respectively, were used as subbase aggregates. Solid samples from the subbase and the subgrade were collected in trenches, which were excavated perpendicular to the road extension. The samples were analyz

The production of emulsions using milk as the continuous phase has a number of applications of interest from the food industry's point of view. In addition, producing an emulsion with a narrow drop size distribution is interesting since their increased stability could avoid Oswald ripening and creaming. Membrane emulsification is a novel technique which helps to obtain a narrower distribution comp

A new analysis of the nearly century-old Lotka-Volterra theory allows us to link species interactions to biodiversity patterns, including: species abundance distributions, estimates of total community size, patterns of community invasibility, and predicted responses to disturbance. Based on a few restrictive assumptions about species interactions, our calculations require only that the community i

C-4 savanna grass species, Digitaria eriantha, Eragrostis lehmanniana and Panicum repens, were grown under optimum growth conditions with the aim of characterizing their above- and below-ground biomass allocation and the response of their gas exchange to changes in light intensity, CO2 concentration and leaf-to-air vapour pressure deficit gradient (D-l). Digitaria eriantha showed the largest above

Ovarian carcinoma is the fourth most common cause of cancer death in women. The cause and pathogenesis of this disease has remained obscure. Galactose, the hydrolyzing product of the milk sugar lactose, has been hypothesized to be toxic to ovarian epithelial cells and consumption of dairy products and lactase persistence has been suggested to be a risk factor for ovarian carcinoma. In adults, down

In mammals, the increase in gene dosage, in the form of polyploidy or involving chromosomal fragments, has deleterious effects [1]. Regulation of appropriate gene product amounts has to be warranted by complex dosage-compensation mechanisms. Lower vertebrates, on the other hand, cope very well with ploidy increase [2 4], implying either effective compensation or a lack of necessity for such mechan

Physicochemical properties of solutions of charged colloids are often dominated by the electrostatic interactions present in such systems. A full determination of these properties constitutes a highly nontrivial many-body problem involving long-range interactions. In electrostatically strongly coupled systems, it is essential to explicitly include both the charged colloids and the small ions in th

The fatty acid amide anandamide produces hypotension and a decrease in systemic vascular resistance in vivo. A drop in blood pressure is also seen with synthetic cannabinoid (CB) receptor agonists. The hypotensive responses to anandamide and synthetic cannabinoids are absent in CB1 receptor gene knockout mice. In isolated arteries and perfused vascular beds, anandamide induces vasodilator response

Aims/hypothesis Peroxisome proliferator activated receptor-gamma coactivator-lp (PGC-1 beta, also known as PPARGCIB) expression is reduced in skeletal muscle from patients with type 2 diabetes mellitus and in elderly subjects. Ala203Pro, a common variant in the PGC-1 beta gene is associated with obesity. The aim of this study was to investigate whether the PGC-1 beta Ala203Pro polymorphism influen

Although chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) patients frequently report symptoms, it is not known which factors determine the course of symptoms over time and if these differ according to the sex of the patient. The current study investigated predictors for presence, development and remission of COPD symptoms in 816 males and 312 females completing 3-yr-follow-up in the European Respirato

General-purpose computing on graphics processing units (GPGPU) is shown to dramatically increase the speed of Monte Carlo simulations of photon migration. In a standard simulation of time-resolved photon migration in a semi-infinite geometry, the proposed methodology executed on a low-cost graphics processing unit (GPU) is a factor 1000 faster than simulation performed on a single standard process

The use of artificial neural networks (ANNs) in problems related to water resources has received steadily increasing interest over the last decade or so. The related method of the self-organizing map (SOM) is an unsupervised learning method to analyze, cluster, and model various types of large databases. There is, however, still a notable lack of comprehensive literature review for SOM along with