Lipocalins are a family of proteins characterized by a conserved eight-stranded β-barrel structure with a ligand-binding pocket. They perform a wide range of biological functions and this functional multiplicity must relate to the lipid partner involved. Apolipoprotein D (ApoD) and its insect homologues, Lazarillo (Laz) and neural Lazarillo (NLaz), share common ancestral functions like longevit...

OBJECTIVE Tenofovir (TDF) affects bone health and is widely used in pregnancy but data are limited on the effects of TDF exposure in utero. We examined the association between duration of in-utero TDF exposure and linear growth in HIV-exposed, uninfected (HEU) infants. DESIGN A prospective cohort of pregnant women initiating TDF-containing regimens at primary care services in Cape Town, South...

Gradients across socio-economic position exist for many measures of children's health and development in higher-income countries. These associations may not be consistent, however, among the millions of children living in lower- and middle-income countries. Our objective was to examine child development and growth in young children across socio-economic position in four developing countries. We...

the stability of learning rate in neural network identifiers and controllers is one of the challenging issues which attracts great interest from researchers of neural networks. this paper suggests adaptive gradient descent algorithm with stable learning laws for modified dynamic neural network (mdnn) and studies the stability of this algorithm. also, stable learning algorithm for parameters of ...

Power system stabilizers (PSSs) must be capable of providing appropriate stabilization signals over abroad range of operating conditions and disturbances. The main idea of this paper is changing aclassic PSS (CPSS) to an adaptive PSS using genetic algorithm. This new genetic algorithm based onadaptive PSS (GAPSS) improves power system damping, considerably. The controller design issue isformula...

We develop a method for the optical flow computation from a zooming image sequence. The synchronisation of image resolution for a pair of successive images in an image sequence is a fundamental requirement for optical flow computation. In a real application, we are, however, required to deal with a zooming and dezooming image sequences, that is, we are required to compute optical flow from a mu...

BACKGROUND For the optimal nutrition of children under 2 years of age, it is considered important that they be exclusively breastfed for the first 6 months before being given complementary food. AIMS AND OBJECTIVES A cross-sectional nutritional baseline survey was undertaken in 2011 in the Kasungu and Mzimba Districts of Malawi to assess the nutritional status of children under 2 years of age...

BACKGROUND Environmental Enteric Dysfunction (EED) in children from low-income countries has been linked to linear growth declines. There is a critical need to identify sensitive and early EED biomarkers. OBJECTIVE Determine whether levels of antibodies against bacterial components flagellin (flic) and lipopolysaccharide (LPS) predict poor growth. DESIGN/METHODS In a prospective birth cohor...

Nearest Neighbour (NN) classification is a widely-used, effective method for both binary and multi-class problems. It relies on the assumption that class conditional probabilities are locally constant. However, this assumption becomes invalid in high dimensions, and severe bias can be introduced, which degrades the performance of the method. The employment of a locally adaptive distance metric ...

this paper introduces a technique for controlling a class of uncertain chaotic systems using an adaptive fuzzy proportional-integrator-derivative (pid) controller with h∞ tracking performance. the purpose of this work is to achieve optimal tracking performance of the controller using backtracking search algorithm (bsa). bsa, which is a novel heuristic algorithm, has an easy structure with singl...