OBJECTIVE To determine the circadian and seasonal variations in the incidence of acute myocardial infarction and the influence of environmental temperature. PATIENTS 633 consecutive patients with acute myocardial infarction admitted to a coronary care unit over four years. SETTING Coronary care unit in a district general hospital. DESIGN An observational study. RESULTS The onset of acut...

Theoretical studies have focused on the environmental temperature of the universal common ancestor of life with conflicting conclusions. Here we provide experimental support for the existence of a thermophilic universal common ancestor. We present the thermal stabilities and catalytic efficiencies of nucleoside diphosphate kinases (NDK), designed using the information contained in predictive ph...

Social structure evolves from a trade-off between the costs and benefits of group-living, which are in turn dependent upon the distribution of key resources such as food and shelter. Males and females, or juveniles and adults, may have different priorities when selecting habitat due to differences in physiological or behavioural imperatives, leading to complex patterns in group composition. We ...

1. Researchers commonly rely on indices of heat tolerance to infer the limits of performance in nature. Unfortunately, many methods are used to estimate heat tolerance, creating difficulties when synthesizing or comparing results among studies. Here, we relate several measures of heat tolerance based on the concept of a performance curve. 2. To evaluate our ideas about the link between two meas...

The current study investigated the effects of temperature manipulation (TM) during late embryogenesis on temperature preference, response to high environmental temperature, behavior, and performance in young layer chicks. Control (CC) embryos (n = 96) were incubated at 37.8 degrees C eggshell temperature throughout incubation. Thermally manipulated embryos (n = 96) were incubated at 37.8 degree...

Background Despite a multitude of anti-smoking campaigns being active worldwide, the number of smokers is currently larger than at any other time in human history. An essential first step towards minimizing the health effects of secondhand smoke (SHS) is to accurately assess the exposure level of individuals. The objectives of this study were to: (i) to develop questionnaires that can identify ...

Laminate composites which are widely used in the aeronautical industry, are usually subjected to frequency variation of environmental temperature and excessive humidity in the in-service environment. The thermal fatigue and moisture absorption in composites may induce material degradation. There is a demand to investigate the coupling damages mechanism and characterize the degradation evolution...

The emergence and spread of highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI) A virus subtype H5N1 in Asia, Europe and Africa has had an enormously socioeconomic impact and presents an important threat to human health because of its efficient animal-to-human transmission. Many factors contribute to the occurrence and transmission of HPAI H5N1 virus, but the role of environmental temperature remains poor...

Usually the environmental parameters influence the sensor characteristics in a nonlinear manner. Therefore obtaining correct readout from a sensor under varying environmental conditions is a complex problem. In this paper we propose a neural network (NN)-based interface framework to automatically compensate for the nonlinear influence of the environmental temperature and the nonlinear-response ...

A core temperature drop after cardiac surgery slows down the patient's recuperation process. In order to minimize the amount of the so-called afterdrop, more knowledge is needed about the impaired thermoregulatory system during anesthesia and the effect of different protocols on temperature distribution. Therefore, a computer model has been developed that describes heat transfer during cardiac ...