für Naturforschung in cooperation with the Max Planck Society for the Advancement of Science under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. Dieses Werk wurde im Jahr 2013 vom Verlag Zeitschrift für Naturforschung in Zusammenarbeit mit der Max-Planck-Gesellschaft zur Förderung der Wissenschaften e.V. digitalisiert und unter folgender Lizenz veröffentlicht: Creative Commons Namen...

Over the past several decades, obesity has grown into a major global epidemic. In the United States (US), more than two-thirds of adults are now overweight and one-third is obese. In this article, we provide an overview of the state of research on the likely economic impact of the US obesity epidemic at the national level. Research to date has identified at least four major categories of econom...

The experience of health impact assessment (HIA) in NSW has shown that it is possible to incorporate considerations of health impacts into decision-making concerning urban planning. In NSW, the Environmental Planning and Assessment Act 1979 is the regulatory framework governing urban planning. This legislative system provides opportunities for HIA and the consideration of health impacts as part...

Objective: Ipomoea mauritiana is used in both Ayurveda and folk medicine systems. The tuberous roots are known to be diuretic, depurative, carminative, and anthelmintic. The objective of the current study was to identify phenolic antioxidants from I. mauritiana using spectrophotometric and LC-MS analysis. Materials and Methods: An activity-guided fractionation and purification process was used t...

We use time-resolved-small angle neutron scattering to study the kinetics of asphaltene nanoparticle aggregation in incompatible crude oil mixtures. We induce asphaltene aggregation by mixing asphaltene-rich Syrian crude oil ~SACO! with a paraffinic British crude oil and observe the scattered neutron intensity, I, as a function of wave number, q, over times, t, ranging from twenty minutes to ab...

For a flat universe presently dominated by smooth energy, either cosmological constant (LCDM) or quintessence (QCDM), we calculate the asymptotic collapsed mass fraction as function of the present ratio of smooth energy to matter energy R0. Identifying the normalized collapsed fraction as a conditional probability for habitable galaxies, we observe that the observed present ratio R0 ∼ 2 is like...

We report, for the first time, direct observation of coherent oscillations in the ground-state of IR775 dye due to microheterogeneous environment. Using ultrafast near-infrared degenerate pump-probe technique centered at 800 nm, we present the dynamics of IR775 in a binary mixture of methanol and chloroform at ultra-short time resolution of 30 fs. The dynamics of the dye in binary mixtures, in ...

The linear thermal expansions (LTE) of bulk nanocrystalline ingot iron (BNII) at six directions on rolling plane and conventional polycrystalline ingot iron (CPII) at one direction were measured from liquid nitrogen temperature to 300 K. Although the volume fraction of grain boundary and residual strain of BNII are larger than those of CPII, LTE of BNII at the six measurement directions were le...

Reducing the size from the bulk material to nanoparticles produces a scaling behavior in physical properties in the later ones, due to the large surface-to-volume fraction. By further size reduction, entering into the subnanometric cluster region, physical properties are largely affected by strong quantum confinement. These quantum size effects (HOMO-LUMO gap), the small size and the specific g...

This article provides an updated review of recent empirical research on the potential impact of private school vouchers. It addresses 3 questions: (a) do students that use vouchers to attend a private school obtain better outcomes than would be obtained in a public school? (b) Do vouchers encourage student sorting and how does sorting affect student outcomes? (c) Does the offer of vouchers prom...