A naturally short sleeper phenotype with a sleep need of less than 6 hours without negative impact on health or performance is rare. We present a case of an acquired short sleeper phenotype after third ventriculostomy. A 59-year-old patient suffering from chronic hydrocephalus reported an average of 7-8 h of nocturnal sleep. After surgical intervention, the patient noted a strikingly reduced sl...

Real-world solids, such as rocks, soft tissues and engineering materials, are often under some form of stress. Most real materials also, to degree, anisotropic due their microstructure, a characteristic called the ‘texture anisotropy’. This anisotropy can stem from preferential grain alignment in polycrystalline aligned micro-cracks or structural reinforcement, collagen bundles biological tissu...

the main design criteria of ballasted railway tracks include rail deflections, rail bending stresses, rail wheel contact stresses, sleeper bending moments and ballast sleeper contact pressures. numerous criteria have been defined for the design of ballasted railway tracks owing to the various mechanical properties of track components and their complex interaction. therefore, railway track desig...

The present paper deals with the problem of quality and quantity change (reduction) of unstressed vowels in Russian depending on their position relative to the stressed syllable and to the word boundaries. Quality change is measured by calculating the probability of vowel omission or replacement by another vowel phoneme. The study is based on a large corpus of read speech (over 30 hours). The r...

Twenty microsatellite markers were isolated and characterized from the Chinese black sleeper, Bostrychus sinensis. Loci were screened in 30 individuals from Taiwan. For each locus, the number of alleles varied from 4 to 22 with mean expected and observed heterozygosity of 0.79 and 0.66, respectively. One locus significantly deviated from Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium after Bonferroni correction an...