Background: Polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) were used in electrical equipment and a range of construction materials. Although banned in the United States and most of Europe in the 1970s, they are highly persistent in the environment and bioaccumulate. Whether PCBs are associated with liver cancer risk at general population levels is unknown. Methods: This study consisted of 136 incident liver can

Recension av Magnus Linton, Text & Stil. Om konsten att berätta med vetenskap. Bedömningen är avgjort positiv. Linton har skrivit en träffande, relevant, adekvat bok för alla som skriver sakprosa – samhälls- och kulturvetare, humanister, essäister. Boken är full av exempel och mindre full av goda råd. Den är därtill mycket välskriven och välkomponerad.

Here we aimed to unify some previous controversial reports on changes in both cannabinoid CB1 receptor (CB1R) expression and glucose metabolism in the forebrain of rodent models of diabetes. We determined how glucose metabolism and its modulation by CB1R ligands evolve in the frontal cortex of young adult male Wistar rats, in the first 8 weeks of streptozotocin-induced type-1 diabetes (T1D). We re

This experience article describes lessons learned as we conducted experiments in a Kubernetes‐based environment, the most notable of which was that the performance of both the Kubernetes control plane and the deployed application depends strongly and in unexpected ways on the performance of the etcd database. The article contains (a) detailed descriptions of how networking with and without Istio w

Service meshes factor out code dealing with inter-micro-service communication. The overall resilience of a cloud application is improved if constituent micro-services return stale data, instead of no data at all. This paper proposes and implements application agnostic caching for micro services. While caching is widely employed for serving web service traffic, its usage in inter-micro-service comm

In the Industry 4.0 era, time-sensitive and missioncritical control applications still have a long way to go, from being tied down and co-located with the systems they control, to taking full advantage of the cloud. Conservatively keeping applications local will deprive these complex applications of abundantcompute capacity, wider system integration, and the potential for collaborative control eff

Recent advances in autonomous vehicles present new opportunities in Intelligent transportation systems (ITS) to address urban transport challenges. Therefore, urban traffic scenarios, and in particular intersections as a bottleneck of transportation network, has received significant attention. In this paper we investigate intelligent traffic control mechanisms for autonomous vehicles at intersecti

Cloud-RAN (C-RAN) is a promising paradigm for the next generation radio access network infrastructure, which offers centralized and coordinated base-band signal processing in a BBU pool. This requires extremely low latency fronthaul links to achieve real-time signal processing. In this paper, we investigate massive MIMO pilot scheduling in a C-RAN infrastructure under a factory automation scenario

Side-channel attacks on cryptographic algorithms targets the implementation of the algorithm. Information can leak from the implementation in several different ways and, in this paper, electromagnetic radiation from an FPGA is considered. We examine to which extent key information from an AES implementation can be deduced using a low-end oscilloscope. Moreover, we examine how the antenna's distanc

In this research note, the authors examine the extent to which one gender is moretrusted than the other, relying on between-subjects survey experiments fielded inGermany, Norway and the United States. The authors’ findings reveal that respondentshave substantially higher trust in women than in men, and that this is partly drivenby gender role beliefs ascribing prosocial behavior more to women. Fur

Purpose of review Neutrophil extracellular traps (NETs) can be found at the sites of vascular lesions and in the circulation of patients with active small vessel vasculitis. Neutrophils from vasculitis patients release more NETs in vitro, and NETs have properties that can harm the vasculature both directly and indirectly. There are several ways to interfere with NET formation, which open for new t

Anti-neutrophil cytoplasmic antibodies (ANCA) are a family of autoantibodies that react with proteins predominantly expressed in cytoplasmic granules of polymorphonuclear neutrophil granulocytes (PMNs). ANCA was initially detected using indirect immunofluorescence, allowing for different patterns such as p-ANCA (perinuclear) and c-ANCA (cytoplasmic) to be distinguished. Today it is common to detec

A group of pauci-immune vasculitides, characterized by neutrophil-rich necrotizing inflammation of small vessels and the presence of antineutrophil cytoplasmic antibodies (ANCAs), is referred to as ANCA-associated vasculitis (AAV). ANCAs against proteinase 3 (PR3) (PR3-ANCA) or myeloperoxidase (MPO) (MPO-ANCA) are found in over 90% of patients with active disease, and these ANCAs are implicated in

We apply spectral stability theory to investigate nonlinear gravity waves in the atmosphere. These waves are determined by modulation equations that result from Wentzel-Kramers-Brillouin theory. First, we establish that plane waves, which represent exact solutions to the inviscid Boussinesq equations, are spectrally stable with respect to their nonlinear modulation equations under the same conditi

One of the factors that can contribute to the resolution of long, doped inorganic scintillators used for nuclear spectroscopy is the variation of the dopant concentration over the length the detector crystal. In this work an investigation of such potential variations in one of the CsI(Tl) scintillators used in the calorimeter, CALIFA, of the R3B experiment at FAIR, has been performed using particl

Topology optimization is a mathematical tool for finding optimal distributions of material phases within a design domain. It is commonly used in early design stages to generate conceptual structural layouts. Ultimately, designs generated by topology optimization consist of distinct material phases with enhanced performance. Most research on topology optimization methods focuses on linear elastic m

The response of floating pile foundations in deep deposits of soft clay is governed by the settlements within the clay deposit surrounding the piles. A long-duration thermal response test (TRT) has been performed to assess the impact of heating and cooling on the geotechnical performance of a vertically loaded slender tubular steel pile in a deep deposit of sensitive clay. The results from the ins

Energy use in buildings has a significant influence on the global energy demand and environmental impacts. Among all building systems, heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) systems are the most energy-intensive in terms of their total energy requirements. The production and operation of HVAC systems have a significant impact on the environment. These systems are also among the largest

Within the context of a sharing economy, the BE-USE project aims to develop behavioural economics experiments that test, examine and generate policy recommendations to advance sustainable urban initiatives. It aims to increase the understanding of cognitive, motivational and contextual factors affecting decision-making processes and choices in urban sharing initiatives.This report is developed und