Fluoride varnishes are fast becoming the standard of care as topical fluoride treatments. Fluoride varnishes still await approval from the FDA for use as caries preventive agents. In the meantime, their use for such purposes is considered "off-label." This article highlights the efficacy of fluoride varnishes as caries preventive agents and introduces some of the commercially available fluoride...

By now there is substantial evidence that Gamma-Ray Bursts (GRBs) originate at cosmological distances from very powerful explosions. The interaction between a GRB and its surrounding environment has dramatic consequences on the environment itself. At early times, the strong X-ray UV afterglow flux photoionizes the medium on distance scales on the order of 100 pc [7], destroys dust [10], creates...

Species are going extinct rapidly, while taxonomic catalogues are still incomplete for even the best-known taxa. Intensive fieldwork is finding species so rare and threatened that some become extinct within years of discovery. Recent bird extinctions in Brazil's coastal forests suggest that some species may have gone extinct before we knew of their existence.

This paper describes an investigation undertaken as part of the FicNet Human-Computer Interaction project into the online amateur fiction community. By working with the community to determine current practices and areas of concern we consider how future technologies such as the semantic web might be used to design applications to support the community. As a first step in this process we gathere...

In this paper we analyse nonparametric methods to estimate risk measures in loss distributions. We study kernel estimation for Value-at-Risk and Tail Value-at-Risk based on transformation of the original data. The proposed method consists of a double transformation kernel estimation. We show that a suitable bandwidth selection criterion has a direct expression for the optimal smoothing paramete...

Biochemistry textbooks depict mitochondria as oxygen-dependent organelles, but many mitochondria can produce ATP without using any oxygen. In fact, several other types of mitochondria exist and they occur in highly diverse groups of eukaryotes - protists as well as metazoans - and possess an often overlooked diversity of pathways to deal with the electrons resulting from carbohydrate oxidation....