iv 1. THE CHALLENGE 1 1.1. The Human Predicament 1 1.2. The Sustainability Notion 2 1.3. The Policy Context 3 2. THE SCENARIO APPROACH 5 2.1. Objectives 5 2.2. System Perspectives and Scenario Criteria 5 2.3. Global Scenarios in Historical Perspective 7 2.4. Methodological Elements 7 3. SCENARIO OVERVIEW 11 4. CRITICAL TRENDS 17 4.1. Population Growth 17 4.2. Economic Growth 18 4.3. Technologic...

Background: Antibiotic resistance and the need for long-term treatments especially for chronic infections necessitate the development <span style="fon...

BACKGROUND Disturbed one-carbon (1-C) metabolism in the mother is associated with poor fetal growth but causality of this relationship has not been established. METHODS We studied the association between maternal total homocysteine and offspring birthweight in the Pune Maternal Nutrition Study (PMNS, Pune, India) and Parthenon Cohort Study (Mysore, India). We tested for evidence of causality ...

The laminar distributions of the pathological changes in the cerebral cortex were compared in the prion diseases sporadic Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (sCJD) and variant CJD (vCJD). First, in some cortical regions, the vacuolation ("spongiform change") was more generally distributed across the cortex in sCJD. Second, there was greater neuronal loss in the upper cortex in vCJD and in the lower cort...

Wild type green fluorescent protein (wt-GFP) and the variant S65T/H148D each exhibit two absorption bands, A and B, which are associated with the protonated and deprotonated chromophores, respectively. Excitation of either band leads to green emission. In wt-GFP, excitation of band A ( approximately 395 nm) leads to green emission with a rise time of 10-15 ps, due to excited-state proton transf...

OBJECTIVE To help understand speech changes in behavioral variant frontotemporal dementia (bvFTD), we developed and implemented automatic methods of speech analysis for quantification of prosody, and evaluated clinical and anatomical correlations. METHODS We analyzed semi-structured, digitized speech samples from 32 patients with bvFTD (21 male, mean age 63 ± 8.5, mean disease duration 4 ± 3....

Noroviruses (NoVs) are the leading cause of gastroenteritis outbreaks in humans worldwide. Since late 2012, a new GII.4 variant Sydney 2012 has caused a significant increase in NoV epidemics in several countries. From November of 2012 to January of 2013, three gastroenteritis outbreaks occurred in two social welfare homes (Outbreaks A and B) and a factory (Outbreak C) in Shenzhen city of China....

Vertebral osteomyelitis is a common pathology affecting the spine. We present the case of a 46-year-old male who was diagnosed with progressive L2 vertebral osteomyelitis due to a rare pathogen, Granulicatella adiacens. Granulicatella adiacens is part of the normal body flora and is often difficult to culture on traditional mediums. The patient required a lateral corpectomy and posterior fixati...

OBJECTIVE Noninvasive brain stimulation in primary progressive aphasia (PPA) is a promising approach. Yet, applied to single cases or insufficiently controlled small-cohort studies, it has not clarified its therapeutic value. We here address the effectiveness of transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) on the semantic PPA variant (sv-PPA), applying a rigorous study design to a large, homo...