Featuring plush rats, well-groomed humans, and a colony of rodents numbering a thousand strong, Ratatouille had shots where the original scene descriptions contained many hundreds of millions of hairs. To make these shots renderable, we developed many new technologies to optimize our RenderMan-based hair rendering pipeline, including caching to speed up runtime sculpting, a technique for optimi...

BACKGROUND The Gold standard treatment for symptomatic gallstone disease is laparoscopic cholecystectomy (LC) since 1990. LC can be performed safely as a day case procedure. The objective of this study was to evaluate the results of laparoscopic cholecystectomy in symptomatic gall stones disease in terms of length of hospital stay, complications, morbidity and mortality. METHODS This retrospe...

Ovarian cancer is the main cause of gynecologic malignancy-related mortality in women. Therefore, the disease requires improvements in treatment options and in the potency of chemotherapeutic drugs. The study of apoptosis in tumor cells is an important field for cancer therapy and cancer molecular biology. It has recently been established that LFG-500, a new synthesized flavonoid with a piperaz...

The in vivo bone response of 3D periodic hydroxyapatite (HA) scaffolds is investigated. Two groups of HA scaffolds (11 mm diameter x 3.5 mm thick) are fabricated by direct-write assembly of a concentrated HA ink. The scaffolds consist of cylindrical rods periodically arranged into four quadrants with varying separation distances between rods. In the first group, HA rods (250 microm in diameter)...

Despite considerable research effort, it remains unclear whether extra-pair fertilizations (EPF) drive the evolution of male secondary ornamentation in socially monogamous systems. In this study, we test the hypothesis that EPF contribute to the evolution or maintenance of male feather ornamentation in a sexually dichromatic passerine, the Scarlet Rosefinch, Carpodacus erythrinus. We show that ...

The aim of this White Paper was to review the current recommendations for strength training of older adults, to promote physical therapist best practice and achieve optimal functional outcomes. A secondary intent was to encourage prospective researchers to use published guidelines to establish an adequate strength stimulus for patients in their research, rather than perpetuating "usual or tradi...

1School of Natural Sciences, Division of Psychology, University of Stirling, Stirling, FK9 4LA, Scotland 2CAPP: Centro de Administracao e Politicas Publicas and Instituto Superior de Ciencias Sociais e Políticas da Universidade Tecnica de Lisboa, Rua Almerindo Lessa, Polo Universitario do Alto da Ajuda, 1349-055 Lisboa, Portugal 3CRIA Centre for the Research in Anthropology and Departament of A...

Bridges only forward The DECbridge 500 product traffic destined for other connects Ethernet/802.3 LANs; local traffic is local area networks (LANs) confined to its home LAN. to fiber distributed One important function of data interface (FDDI) bridges is the ability, LANs and is, therefore, under network management a fundamental element of control, to block traffic an extended LAN. Developers of...