People believe what they can see. The Poles exist as a frozen dream to most people. The International Polar Year wants to break the ice (so to speak), open up the Poles to the general public, support current polar research, and encourage new research projects. The IPY officially begins in March, 2007. As part of this effort, the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) and the British Antarctic Survey (BA...

A novel method is presented for the identification of the absolute crystallographic structure in multi-domain polar materials such as ferroelectric KTiOPO4. Resonant (or 'anomalous') X-ray diffraction spectra collected across the absorption K edge of Ti (4.966 keV) on a single Bragg reflection demonstrate a huge intensity ratio above and below the edge, providing a polar domain contrast of ∼270...

The size and shape of the plant leaf is an important agronomic trait. To understand the molecular mechanism governing plant leaf shape, we characterized a classic rice (Oryza sativa) dwarf mutant named narrow leaf1 (nal1), which exhibits a characteristic phenotype of narrow leaves. In accordance with reduced leaf blade width, leaves of nal1 contain a decreased number of longitudinal veins. Anat...

We propose a numerical framework that permits an effective atlas-like representation of chemico-biological space based on a series of Cartesian planes mapping the ligands with the corresponding targets connected by an affinity parameter (K(i) or related). The numerical framework is derived from the concept of ligand efficiency indices, which provide a natural coordinate system combining the pot...

We investigated utilization of Japanese geostationary meteorological satellite, Multi-functional Transport Satellite (MTSAT) data which is able to provide hourly image to a terrestrial monitoring. Firstly, SZA angular effect in reflectance channel was corrected, then algorithms for daily composite were compared. Hourly measurement of MTSAT increased the chance of observing cloud-free land surfa...

sponges are the simplest multicellular animals that lack defense mechanisms and rely on chemical defense  that have been used by mankind to develop antimicrobial drugs against diseases.  the present study was designed to demonstrate the antibacterial and antifungal activities of marine sponge dysidea pallescens semipolar and nonpolar extracts. in this study, d. pallescens were collected from he...

beside ziegler-natta and phillips catalysts the development of methylaluminoxane (mao) as cocatalyst incombination with metallocenes or other transition metal complexes for the polymerization of olefins haswidely increased the possibilities in controlling the polymer composition, polymer structure, tacticity and special properties with high precision. these catalysts allow the synthesis of isot...

A coarse-grained model for protein-folding dynamics is introduced based on a discretized representation of torsional modes. The model, based on the Ramachandran map of the local torsional potential surface and the class (hydrophobic/polar/neutral) of each residue, recognizes patterns of both torsional conformations and hydrophobic-polar contacts, with tolerance for imperfect patterns. It incorp...

BACKGROUND Myocardial perfusion imaging (MPI) has been used to estimate cardiac event risk. The aim of the present study is to achieve stable risk estimation based on perfusion scoring and a multi-center prognostic database. METHODS AND RESULTS Multivariate logistic regression analysis was performed to estimate cardiac event risk based on a J-ACCESS study. A stress-MPI was performed in 45 pat...

Feature points’ matching is a popular method in dealing with object recognition and image matching problems. However, variations of images, such as shift, rotation, and scaling, influence the matching correctness. Therefore, a feature point matching system with a distinctive and invariant feature point detector as well as robust description mechanism becomes the main challenge of this issue. We...