BACKGROUND Perfluoropolyethers (PFPEs) are non-reactive perfluorinated (no hydrogen atoms) liquid polymers that showed promise as ingredients of protective preparations in occupational dermatology. OBJECTIVE The aim of this study was to investigate if oil-in-water (o/w) emulsions containing 0.5, 1.0, 2.0 and 4.0% PFPEs (molecular weight 6,250 D) prevent epidermal barrier disruption induced by...

Pyrantel pamoate paste (19.13% w/w pyrantel base) for the treatment of tapeworm, Anoplocephala spp was evaluated for target animal safety and tolerance in horses treated orally at 0, 1, 3, 5, and 10 times the clinical dose of 13.2 mg pyrantel base/kg body weight administered daily for six consecutive days. Parameters evaluated included clinical signs, food and water consumption, body weights, p...

Source: Robot whiskers used to sense features-Seals track the hydrodynamic trails of their prey w w w .d o c u-tra c k .c o m Conclusions • 3D flow patterns possible (complex config.) • Animals also use information about moment –Recordings rat trigeminal ganglion –At whisker base à could be low frequency counterpart to the whisker vibrations

Main methods, algorithms and applications of the Variable Neighborhood Search metaheuristic are surveyed, in view of a chapter of the Encyclopedia of Optimization.

two neighborhoods developed within the last 50 years were classified as W-L high wire code (6). Based on these Columbus data, if cases from the inner city are matched with controls from newer neighborhoods, odds ratios exceeding a value of 3.0 could be produced, falsely associating high wire code with childhood cancer. Evidence exists that the cases in the 1988 Denver study may be from older ne...

BACKGROUND Control selection is a major challenge in epidemiologic case-control studies. The aim of our study was to evaluate using hospital versus neighborhood control groups in studying risk factors of esophageal squamous cell carcinoma (ESCC). METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS We compared the results of two different case-control studies of ESCC conducted in the same region by a single resear...

This paper describes a tabu search heuristic for the vehicle routing problem with soft time windows. This problem allows lateness at customer locations although a penalty is then incurred and added to the objective value. By adding large penalty values, the vehicle routing problem with hard time windows can be addressed as well. In the tabu search, a neighborhood of the current solution is crea...

The neighborhood of a pair of vertices u, v in a triple system is the set of vertices w such that uvw is an edge. A triple system H is semi-bipartite if its vertex set contains a vertex subset X such that every edge of H intersects X in exactly two points. It is easy to see that if H is semi-bipartite, then the neighborhood of every pair of vertices in H is an independent set. We show a partial...

For a graph G = (V,E), a non-empty set S ⊆ V is a global offensive alliance if for every v ∈ V − S, at least half of the vertices from the closed neighborhood of v are in S. A set S ⊆ V is a global strong offensive alliance if for each vertex v ∈ V −S, a strict majority of the vertices of the closed neighborhood of v are in S. The cardinality of a minimum global (strong) offensive alliance of a...

Home Office (Grant number: PTA-033-2005-00028). We gratefully acknowledge the three anonymous reviewers, whose comments and suggestions improved an earlier version of this paper. Criminologists have long contended that neighborhoods are important determinants of how individuals perceive their risk of criminal victimization. Yet, despite the theoretical importance and policy-relevance of these c...