Optoacoustic imaging is a rapidly expanding field for the diagnosis, characterization, and treatment evaluation of cancer. However, the availability of tumor specific exogenous contrast agents is still limited. Here, we report on a small targeted contrast agent for optoacoustic imaging using a black hole quencher® (BHQ) dye. The sonophore BHQ-1 exhibited strong, concentration-dependent, optoaco...

Convenient reading out and/or determination of ionic strength (IS) is of great significance for both scientific research and real life applications. We presented here a novel method for the rapid and sensitive IS assay based on the electrolyte-induced sensitive wavelength blueshifts of the reflection spectra of polyacrylate capped Fe3O4 magnetic photonic crystals (PA-Fe3O4-MPCs). For HCl, MgSO4...

Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) is a widely used mathematical programming approach for evaluating the relative efficiency of Decision Making Units (DMUs). Conventional DEA methods treat DMUs as ‘‘black boxes’’, focusing entirely on their relative efficiencies. We propose an efficient two-stage fuzzy DEA model to calculate the efficiency scores for a DMU and its sub-DMUs. We use the Stackelberg ...

Traditional valuation tools do not adequately support management’s decisions because they ignore the benefits of managers’ flexibility and future opportunities. A new technique for evaluating strategic investment decisions is the real options approach, which is capable of including the value of active management and strategic opportunities under uncertainty. This paper applies real options tech...

Reductive genomic evolution, driven by genetic drift, is common in endosymbiotic bacteria. Genome reduction is less common in free-living organisms, but it has occurred in the numerically dominant open-ocean bacterioplankton Prochlorococcus and "Candidatus Pelagibacter," and in these cases the reduction appears to be driven by natural selection rather than drift. Gene loss in free-living organi...

The properties of the thermal radiation are discussed by using the new equation of state density motivated by the generalized uncertainty relation in the quantum gravity. There is no burst at the last stage of the emission of a Schwarzshild black hole. When the new equation of state density is utilized to investigate the entropy of a scalar field outside the horizon of a static black hole, the ...

We implement an estimator of the model-free implied volatility derived by Britten-Jones and Neuberger (2000) and investigate its information content in the S&P 500 index options. In contrast to the commonly used Black-Scholes implied volatility, the model-free implied volatility is not based on any specific option pricing model and thus provides a direct test of the informational efficiency of ...

The Black-Scholes(BS) model has been widely and successfully used to model the return of asset and to price financial options. Despite of its success the basic assumptions of this model, that is, Brownian motion and normal distribution are not always supported by empirical studies. Those studies showed the two empirical phenomena: (1) the asymmetric leptokurtic features, (2) the volatility smil...

An understanding of the surface albedo of high latitudes is crucial for climate change studies. MODIS albedo retrievals flagged as high quality compare well with in situ Greenland Climate Network (GC-Net) measurements but cover too small an area to fully characterize Greenland's albedo in non-summer months. In contrast, poor quality MODIS retrievals provide adequate spatio-temporal coverage, bu...

Seyfert nuclei are typical active galactic nuclei (AGNs) in the local universe, which are thought to be powered by gas accretion onto a supermassive black hole (SMBH). The dynamical effect exerted either by non-axisymmetric gravitational potential (such as a stellar bar) or by interaction with other galaxies has been often considered to cause the efficient gas fueling. However, recent systemati...