Planting seedlings is a common technique for abandoned pastures restoration in the tropics, supposedly by increasing the seedling recruitment and accelerating succession. In this study we evaluated the role of a young restored forest (one year old) in enhancing seedling establishment from two sources (seed rain and seed bank), in the Atlantic Rainforest region in Southern Brazil. We compared ab...

OBJECTIVES The research and development process in the field of rare diseases is characterised by many well-known difficulties, and a large percentage of orphan medicinal products do not reach the marketing approval.This work aims at identifying orphan medicinal products that failed the developmental process and investigating reasons for and possible factors influencing failures. DESIGN Drugs...

In recent years, visual surveillance has gained importance in security, law enforcement and military applications. Due to the wide use of video surveillance systems, the amount of data that has to be monitored and interpreted has increased enormously. Nowadays, the pure mass of information that has to be handled by the operators of such systems has overgrown their capabilities. It is therefore ...

Programs should create and enforce written policies on the designation, retention, and disposal of abandoned embryos. In the absence of program-specific policies, it is ethically acceptable for a program or facility to consider embryos to have been abandoned if at least 5 years have passed since contact with an individual or couple, diligent efforts have been made to contact the individual or c...

The matter of ‘abandoned embryos’ arises when surplus IVF embryos are frozen and stored for later use. If the fertility clinic or storage facility in question does not have clear direction about what to do with these embryos, and/or payment for storage ceases, and/or the embryo providers cannot be reached, the embryos raise an ethical and practical challenge. On the one hand, there is a commitm...

As an alternative to the tracking-based approaches that heavily depend on accurate detection of moving objects, which often fail for crowded scenarios, we present a pixelwise method that employs dual foregrounds to extract temporally static image regions. Depending on the application, these regions indicate objects that do not constitute the original background but were brought into the scene a...

Switching between tasks requires individuals to inhibit mental representations of the previous task demands and to activate representations of the new demands. To date, investigators have identified only one way to measure task set inhibition-that is, through a backward inhibition (BI) paradigm. In this paradigm, participants take more time to return to a task set that was recently abandoned (e...

OBJECTIVE The aim of this study was to determine the association between urinary cadmium (U-cd) concentration and diabetes in middle-aged Korean residents of abandoned mines using the first Health Effect Surveillance for Residents in Abandoned Metal mines (HESRAM). METHODS This study was cross-sectional study conducted on 719 residents between 40-70 years in 38 abandoned metal mines in Korea....

Abandoned object detection is one of the most practically useful areas of computer vision due to its application in automated video surveillance systems for the detection of suspicious activities that might endanger public safety, especially in crowded places like airports, railway stations, shopping malls, movie theatres and the like. An abandoned object is defined as one that has been lying s...