Light was thrown on the nuclear aspects of Herndon’s georeactor. His thesis is that a power producing droplet of liquid uranium, possessing a radius of about 5 km, operated during the last 4.5 billions of years in the center of the Earth and producing 3–6 TW of thermal power. It could be shown that indeed initial criticality was possible due to the high U-235/U-238 enrichment of approximately 3...

Natural, dissolved (238)U-series radionuclides (U, (226)Ra, (222)Rn) and activity ratios (A.R.s: (234)U/(238)U; (228)Ra/(226)Ra) in Continental Intercalaire (CI) groundwaters and limited samples from the overlying Complexe Terminal (CT) aquifers of Algeria and Tunisia are discussed alongside core measurements for U/Th (and K) in the contexts of radiological water quality, geochemical controls i...

BACKGROUND This study was performed to evaluate association of gene polymorphisms among proinflammatory cytokines and susceptibility to chronic idiopathic urticaria (CIU). METHODS Ninety patients with prolonged urticaria more than 6 weeks were included as case group. Single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) of IL-6 (G/C -174, G/A nt565) and TNF-α (G/A -308, G/A -238) were evaluated, using polym...

OBJECTIVE To evaluate whether long-term exposure to heavy environmental pollution with polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) could result in impairment of thyroid status as evaluated by an epidemiological field survey. METHODS Thyroid volume (ThV) was measured by ultrasound in 238 employees of a factory (EMP) which previously produced PCBs and 454 adolescents from the surrounding area polluted by ...

BACKGROUND Lung cancer is the most common second primary cancer. We investigated whether the TNF-alpha-308 and TNF-alpha-238 polymorphisms were associated with the susceptibility and severity of lung cancer as the second primary cancer (LC2). MATERIAL/METHODS This study included 104 patients from the group LC2. The control subjects included 2 groups. The first control group (LC1) comprised 20...

Sector field ICP-MS has been used to determine 239+240 Pu activity and 240 Pu/ 239 Pu atom ratio profiles in a sediment core obtained in 1997 from the Danube Delta region of the Black Sea. The 239+240 Pu activity profile reveals the presence of a 1963 stratospheric fallout peak, along with two more recent peaks stemming from fluvial transport of Chernobyl Pu through the Danube watershed into th...

Uranium-238 is used extensively in nuclear reactor cores. Its nuclear properties have a significant effect on many aspects of the entire fuel cycle process from enrichment facilities and power production to nuclear waste storage facilities. In order to safely design such systems, an accurate evaluation of neutron interactions with U is required. This paper describes a process of quantifying dif...

Image segmentation is the process of dividing an image into multiple segments (sets of pixels, also known as superpixels). The goal of segmentation is to simplify and/or change the representation of an image into something that is more meaningful and easier to analyze. Meaningful in the sense that each segment will hopefully correspond to a part/subpart of an object (e.g, person, head) or backg...

Bacillus subtilis tryptophanyl-tRNA synthetase (TrpRS) is a homodimeric enzyme. A model for its ability to recognize tRNA(Trp) in B. subtilis was proposed by using computer modelling. This was based on the the fact that there is high homology among bacterial TrpRSs [Chen, Jiang, Jin and Wang (2001) Acta Biochim. Biophys. Sinica 33, 687-690], in which the enzyme dimer binds to two tRNA(Trp) mole...

Background The pro-inflammatory cytokine, tumor necrosis factor-alpha (TNF-α), is a pathogenic element for a number of disorders. Previous studies have reported that the -1031 T/C and -238 G/A polymorphisms in the promoter region of the TNF-α gene are important factors in reproductive-related disorders. One of the most common gynecological diseases of women during the reproductive years is endo...