Low back pain, which most common cause is degenerative disc disease, currently represents a serious problem due to its socio-economic repercussions. Different factors are involved in the degenerative process, being the most common: the loads on the spine, repeated flexion movements and individual genetic characteristics. Nowadays, there is no agreement on whether instability is the main cause o...

The reduction of CO2 emissions associated with vehicle use is an important element of a global transition to sustainable mobility and is a major long-term challenge for society. Vehicle and fuel technologies are part of a global energy system, and assessing the impact of the availability of clean energy technologies and advanced vehicle technologies on sustainable mobility is a complex task. Th...

Introduction One of the main objectives of this volume is to engage with the long lasting debate in sociology regarding the consequences of the industrialisation process for social mobility. At the heart of this debate is the so-called 'liberal thesis of industrialisation' which states that the industrialisation process brings about not only more opportunity for social mobility, but also more e...

Previous reports have described pgg2, a polygalacturonase-encoding gene of Penicillium griseoroseum, as an attractive model for transcriptional regulation studies, due to its high expression throughout several in vitro growth conditions, even in the presence of non-inducing sugars such as sucrose. A search for regulatory motifs in the 5' upstream regulatory sequence of pgg2 identified a putativ...

The medium access control (MAC) protocol is the main element which determines the system performance in wireless local area networks. The MAC technique of the IEEE 802.11 protocol is called Distributed Coordination Function (DCF). In IEEE 802.11 Wireless Local Area Networks (WLANs), network nodes experiencing collisions on the shared channel need to backoff for a random period of time, which is...

Movement disorders (MDs) are frequently associated with sensory abnormalities. In particular, proprioceptive deficits have been largely documented in both hypokinetic (Parkinson's disease) and hyperkinetic conditions (dystonia), suggesting a possible role in their pathophysiology. Proprioceptive feedback is a fundamental component of sensorimotor integration allowing effective planning and exec...

The mammalian dihydrofolate reductase (DHFR) gene promoters contain several conserved sequence elements which bind protein, and yet there are other conserved DNA sequences that do not footprint. We report here that mutation of one of these conserved non-footprinting regions increases transcription from this promoter both in vitro and in vivo. We show that this conserved region is flanked by sit...

Over the last several decades, the Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory (CRREL) has extensively tested and analyzed issues related to vehicle performance in winter. Using this knowledge and the experimental database, models were developed to capture the important elements for cold regions mobility performance. These models span a range of resolutions and fidelities and include three...

This article revives the debate over whether women's upward mobility prospects decline as they climb organizational hierarchies. Although this proposition is a core element of the "glass ceiling" metaphor, it has failed to gain strong support in previous research. The article establishes a firm theoretical foundation for expecting an increasing female disadvantage, with an eye toward defining t...