Background: The COVID-19 outbreak has resulted in collision between patients infected with SARS-CoV-2 and those with cancer on different fronts. Patients with cancer have been impacted by deferral, modification, and even cessation of therapy. Adaptive measures to minimize hospital exposure, following the precautionary principle, have been proposed for cancer care during COVID-19 era. We present he

Introduction: Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and substance use disorder frequently co-occur and tend to have their onset during adolescence. Although research has highlighted the importance of treating these disorders in an integrated fashion, there is a dearth of empirically validated integrated treatment options for adolescents with this comorbidity. This paper describes the study protoco

Internet-of-things systems are difficult to understand and debug due to their distributed nature and weak connectivity. We address this problem by using relational reference attribute grammars to model and analyze IoT systems with unreachable parts. A transitive device-dependency analysis is given as an example.

Managing variability in control programs often requires code duplication or that all variants are anticipated in advance. In this paper, we present a new approach to obtaining modular functionality reuse across variants. Using the language mechanisms diagram inheritance and connection interception, a feature model and an interactive feature-selection wizard can be automatically derived from the co

The amyloid cascade hypothesis, according to which the self-assembly of amyloid-β peptide (Aβ) is a causative process in Alzheimer’s disease, has driven many therapeutic efforts for the past 20 years. Failures of clinical trials investigating Aβ-targeted therapies have been interpreted as evidence against this hypothesis, irrespective of the characteristics and mechanisms of action of the therapeu

The name Edward Marsh occasionally crops up in handbooks on English literature, where he is mentioned as the editor of the five volumes of Georgian Poetry that appeared from 1912 to 1922. Georgian poetry, however defined, has been decried for the best part of a century, and Marsh’s reputation among representatives of English Literature has been correspondingly lacklustre. This article presents a r

This study provides new quantitative NO concentrations measurements in n-propanol + air and i-propanol + air flames together with a new combustion kinetic model. The heat flux method was employed to stabilize propyl alcohols flames and the initial gas conditions were set to 323 K, 1 atm, and ϕ=0.7-1.4. Saturated laser-induced fluorescence was employed to measure NO concentration in the post-combus

Background: The neural crest is a transient embryonic stem cell population. Hypoxia inducible factor (HIF)-2α is associated with neural crest stem cell appearance and aggressiveness in tumors. However, little is known about its role in normal neural crest development. Results: Here, we show that HIF-2α is expressed in trunk neural crest cells of human, murine, and avian embryos. Knockdown as well

Systematics is described for annotation of variations in RNA molecules. The conceptual framework is part of Variation Ontology (VariO) and facilitates depiction of types of variations, their functional and structural effects and other consequences in any RNA molecule in any organism. There are more than 150 RNA related VariO terms in seven levels, which can be further combined to generate even mor

Objective: There is an urgent need for sensitive, widely available, blood-based screening tests to identify presymptomatic individuals destined to develop Alzheimer's disease (AD). We investigated whether tau detected in plasma by our in-house NT1 assay is specifically altered in AD, and when applied to patients with subjective cognitive decline (SCD) or mild cognitive impairment (MCI) can serve t

B lymphocyte-induced maturation protein-1 (Blimp-1), the transcription factor encoded by the gene Prdm1, plays a number of crucial roles in the adaptive immune system, which result in the maintenance of key effector functions of B- and T-cells. Emerging clinical data, as well as mechanistic evidence from mouse studies, have additionally identified critical functions of Blimp-1 in the maintenance o

One of the major problems with malignant brain tumours, such as glioblastoma multiforme, is that despite being able to remove the major bulk of the tumour through surgery and treating the patients with chemotherapy and radiotherapy, we know that tumour cells have already spread throughout the brain. Furthermore, we now know that the glioblastoma cells effectively suppress the patients’ own anti-tu

Location based services (LBS) extensively utilize proximity testing to help people discover nearby friends, devices, and services. Current practices rely on full trust to the service providers: users share their locations with the providers who perform proximity testing on behalf of the users. Unfortunately, location data has been often breached by LBS providers, raising privacy concerns over the

Cloud Storage Providers (CSPs) offer solutions to relieve users from locally storing vast amounts of data, including personal and sensitive ones. While users may desire to retain some privacy on the data they outsource, CSPs are interested in reducing the total storage space by employing compression techniques such as deduplication. We propose a new cryptographic primitive that simultaneously real

Efficient unit propagation for clausal constraints is a core building block of conflict-driven clause learning (CDCL) Boolean satisfiability (SAT) and lazy clause generation constraint programming (CP) solvers. Conflict-driven pseudo-Boolean (PB) solvers extend the CDCL paradigm from clausal constraints to integer linear constraints, also known as (linear) PB constraints. For PB solvers, many diff

We propose that CDCL SAT solver heuristics such as restarts and clause database management can be analysed by studying the resolution proofs produced by the solvers, and by trimming these proofs to extract the clauses actually used to reach the final conclusion. We find that for non-adaptive Luby restarts higher frequency makes both untrimmed and trimmed proofs smaller, while adaptive restarts bas

As glaciers retreat, their forelands represent “natural laboratories” for the study of primary succession. This review describes how certain arthropods conquer pristine ground and develop food webs before the establishment of vascular plants. Based on soil samples, pitfall traps, fallout and sticky traps, gut content studies, and some unpublished data, we compare early arthropod succession on glac

The insect olfactory system operates as a well-choreographed ensemble of molecules which functions to selectively translate volatile chemical messages present in the environment into neuronal impulses that guide insect behaviour. Of these molecules, binding proteins are believed to transport hydrophobic odorant molecules across the aqueous lymph present in antennal sensilla to receptors present in