Previous studies have shown that both density gradient centrifugation (DGC) and swim up (SU) procedures can select spermatozoa with longer telomeres for assisted reproduction techniques (ART). However, it is unknown which approach is more effective. The aim of the present study was to compare the effects of these two methods on sperm telomere length (STL). A total of 150 normozoospermic subject...

BACKGROUND In the past 15 years mortality rates from liver disease have doubled in the UK. Brief alcohol advice is cost effective, but clinically meaningful reductions in alcohol consumption only occur in around 1 in 10 individuals. AIM To provide evidence that detecting early liver disease in the community is feasible, practical, and that feedback of liver risk can increase the proportion of...

scale transmission loss facility for flat lightweight panels. Abstract: The design, construction and qualification of a small-scale sound transmission loss (STL) facility are described. STL measurements were made using the sound intensity technique based on ASTM E 2249-02 [1]. The volume of the irregular-shaped reverberant source chamber was 15 m 3 , and the volume of the regular-shaped anechoi...

In our current undergraduate curriculum, the Operating Systems (OS) course provides in-depth understanding of concepts related to concurrency and parallelism. Typically, the laboratory exercises and programming projects in this course are performed in C-language under Linux, an OS that is unfamiliar to many students. Most of the students primarily have only Java experience under WindowsTM. Cons...

DNA metabolism and repair is vital for the maintenance of genome integrity. Specific proteinaceous inhibitors of key factors in this process have high potential for deciphering pathways of DNA metabolism and repair. The dUTPase enzyme family is responsible for guarding against erroneous uracil incorporation into DNA. Here, we investigate whether the staphylococcal Stl repressor may interact wit...

5 We present a new approach for the design of a synthetic biological circuit whose behaviour is specified in terms of signal temporal logic (STL) formulae. We first show how to characterise with STL formulae the input/output behaviour of biological modules miming the classical logical gates (AND, NOT, OR). Hence, we provide the regions of the parameter space for which these specifications are s...

Conventional carbohydrate histochemistry and the binding patterns of 21 lectins were analysed to characterise the glycoconjugate content in the components of the vomeronasal organ of the armadillo Chaetophractus villosus. The mucomicrovillous complex of the sensory epithelium bound most of the lectins studied. No reaction was observed with Con A, PSA, S-Con A and SBA, and the sustentacular cell...

Horizontal transfer of mobile genetic elements within Staphylococci is of high biomedical significance as such elements are frequently responsible for virulence and toxic effects. Staphylococcus-encoded repressor proteins regulate the replication of these mobile genetic elements that are located within the so-called pathogenicity islands. Here, we report structural and functional characterizati...

We present a first lock-free design and implementation of a dynamically resizable array (vector). The most extensively used container in the C++ Standard Template Library (STL) is vector, offering a combination of dynamic memory management and constant-time random access. Our approach is based on a single 32-bit word atomic compare-and-swap (CAS) instruction. It provides a linearizable and high...

Monitoring transient behaviors of real-time systems plays an important role in model-based systems design. Signal Temporal Logic (STL) emerges as a convenient and powerful formalism for continuous and hybrid systems. In this paper we present an efficient algorithm for computing the robustness degree in which a piecewise-continuous signal satisfies or violates an STL formula. Our algorithm, by l...