Introduction: The healing process after surgery is a challenging issue for surgeons. Various materials and techniques have been developed to facilitate this process and reduce its period. Fibrin adhesives are often used in cardiothoracic and vascular surgery to seal diffuse microvascular bleeding and in general and plastic surgery to seal wound borders. This Case report and literature review ...

Adaptation of pinnipeds to the marine habitat imposed parallel evolutions in their parasites. Ancestral pinnipeds must have harboured sucking lice, which were ancestors of the seal louse Echinophthirius horridus. The seal louse is one of the few insects that successfully adjusted to the marine environment. Adaptations such as keeping an air reservoir and the ability to hold on to and move on th...

Prior efforts to characterize the capabilities of the vibrissal system in seals have yielded conflicting results. Here, we measured the sensitivity of the vibrissal system of a harbor seal (Phoca vitulina) to directly coupled sinusoidal stimuli delivered by a vibrating plate. A trained seal was tested in a psychophysical paradigm to determine the smallest velocity that was detectable at nine fr...

Fish populations are increasingly affected by multiple human and natural impacts including exploitation, eutrophication, habitat alteration and climate change. As a result many collapsed populations may have to recover in ecosystems whose structure and functioning differ from those in which they were formerly productive and supported sustainable fisheries. Here we investigate how a cod (Gadus m...

The Incorporation Charter for the city of Krakow, the former capital of Poland, is one of the most valuable documents stored in the National Archives in Krakow. The document, which was written in 1257 on parchment, grants Krakow the Magdeburg rights and regulates its legal, statutory, economic and settlement-related aspects. The Charter was placed in the National Register of the Memory of the W...

The nonlinear coupling vibration and bifurcation of a high-speed centrifugal compressor with a labyrinth seal and two air-film journal bearings are presented in this paper. The rotary shaft and disk are modeled as a rigid Jeffcott rotor. Muszynska’s model is used to express the seal force with multiple parameters. For air-film journal bearings, the model proposed by Zhang et al. is adopted to e...

AIM To evaluate the efficacy and safety of Angio-Seal device in achieving rapid hemostasis of the access site after percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) compared with manual compression. METHODS From December 2002 to November 2003, the device was used in 88 nonconsecutive patients underwent PCI, their age was 58 +/- 9 years and 78% were male, and time to hemostasis, time to ambulation and...

Set expansion refers to expanding a given partial set of “seed” objects into a more complete set. One system that does set expansion is SEAL (Set Expander for Any Language), which expands entities automatically by utilizing resources from the Web in a language independent fashion. In a previous study, SEAL showed good set expansion performance using three seed entities; however, when given a la...

The efficiency of a metaheuristic algorithm for global optimization is based on its ability to search and find the global optimum. However, a good search often requires to be balanced between exploration and exploitation of the search space. In this paper, a new metaheuristic algorithm called Ringed Seal Search (RSS) is introduced. It is inspired by the natural behavior of the seal pup. This al...