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The evolution of cooperation requires benefits of group living to exceed costs. Hence, some components of fitness are expected to increase with increasing group size, whereas others may decrease because of competition among group members. The social spiders provide an excellent system to investigate the costs and benefits of group living: they occur in groups of various sizes and individuals are r
Background and Objectives. From 1994 to 1997 we conducted a population-based, prospective study on intensive therapy in newly diagnosed symptomatic myeloma patients younger than 60 years, comparing their survival to that of a conventionally treated historic population. Long-term results are presented, including the impact of the degree of response on survival and relapse pattern after transplantat
A technique for optical control of the spatial distribution of laser-accelerated ion beams is presented. An ultra-short laser pulse, tightly focused to relativistic intensities on a thin foil target, drives a beam of MeV ions. An auxiliary, nanosecond laser pulse drives a shock and locally deforms the initially flat target prior to the main pulse interaction. By changing the properties of the shoc
Objectives: The new percutaneous mitral annuloplasty Viking device was evaluated in surviving sheep with pacing-induced mitral regurgitation. Methods and results: Twenty sheep were subjected to rapid ventricular pacing for one to three months, leading to cardiomyopathy and mitral regurgitation. Device implantation could be successfully performed in 11 of these animals after pacemaker treatment for
Motivation: Array comparative genomic hybridization (aCGH) provides a genome- wide technique to screen for copy number alteration. The existing segmentation approaches for analyzing aCGH data are based on modeling data as a series of discrete segments with unknown boundaries and unknown heights. Although the biological process of copy number alteration is discrete, in reality a variety of biologic
Background: Long-term frozen storage may alter the results of prostate-specific antigen (PSA) measurements, mainly because of degradation of free PSA (fPSA) in vitro. We compared the effects of long-term storage on fPSA, total PSA (tPSA), and complexed PSA (cPSA) in serum vs EDTA-plasma samples. Methods: We measured fPSA and tPSA concentrations in matched pairs of archival serum and EDTA-plasma sa
A prospective and controlled study of training after surgery for lumbar disc herniation (LDH). The objective was to determine the effect of early neuromuscular customized training after LDH surgery. No consensus exists on the type and timing of physical rehabilitation after LDH surgery. Patients aged 15-50 years, disc prolapse at L4-L5 or L5-S1. Before surgery, at 6 weeks, 4, and 12 months postope
Experimentally determined mass transfer coefficients for wood surfaces are often much lower than theoretically and experimentally determined coefficients for other surfaces. An investigation of this is made by comparing mass transfer coefficients for water and saturated non-wood surfaces, with coefficients measured for wood surfaces. It is found that measurements on wood surfaces are usually evalu
This study is focused on the survival of fetal neocortical grafts placed in the infarcted adult host cortex of the spontaneously hypertensive rat and describes the ability of host axonal regeneration into the graft after a focal ischaemic lesion. Five to seven days following ligation of the right middle cerebral artery, dissociated neocortical primordium from fetuses of gestational age 12-18 days
An overview is presented of the characteristics of HEP computing and its mapping to the Grid paradigm. This is followed by a synopsis of the main experiences and lessons learned by HEP experiments in their use of DataGrid middleware using both the EDG application testbed and the LCG production service. Particular reference is made to experiment lsquodata challengesrsquo, and a forward look is give
Fertility and outcome of pregnancy were assessed in all 78 women below 40 years of age in a total, unselected series of patients with Crohn's disease, diagnosed during a 17-year period and consecutively treated with resectional surgery, in most cases at an early stage. The median follow-up time after the primary operation was 12.8 years. During the observation time there were 87 pregnancies in 44
The aim of this research was to determine the load carrying capacity of curved glulam beams reinforced perpendicular to grain and subjected to climate induced internal stresses. The self-tapping screws used as reinforcement prevent the glulam to split along the grain causing failure perpendicular to grain. Different tests were performed; specimens seasoned in dry and moist climate, specimens expos
The scattering determinant for the scattering of waves from several obstacles is considered in the case of elastic solids with voids. The multi-scattering determinant displays contributions from periodic ray-splitting orbits. A discussion of the weights of such orbits is presented
Fluorescence molecular tomography (FMT) suffers from inherent ill-posedness due to the vast number of possible solutions to the reconstruction problem. To increase the robustness of such a problem one need prior information. We present here a method for rendering a priori information of the position of a fluorescent inclusion inside turbid media. The method utilizes solely two spectral bands withi
We examine the rotational properties of a mixture of two Bose gases. Considering the limit of weak interactions between the atoms, we investigate the behavior of the system under a fixed angular momentum. We demonstrate a number of exact results in this many-body system.
