Background Nursing homes fill a vital role in our society — caring for an increasingly frail population, especially for the indigent. About 98,000 mostly elderly Californians are cared for in more than 1,100 freestanding skilled nursing facilities (SNFs) at any given time. And demand for skilled nursing services will increase as baby boomers approach retirement age. California’s age 65-and-over...

Two key measures of U.S. economic growth—the annual rate of change in real output and in productivity—have improved considerably in recent years.1 Between 1996 and 1998, growth in productivity in the largest segment of the economy, the private nonfarm business sector, averaged nearly 2 percent. This growth rate, the strongest sustained pace since 1983-85, appears to signal some fundamental impr...

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Cancer is a leading cause of death in the United States and other developed countries, spiking in incidence in the 20 century. Along with other explanations, the hygiene hypothesis should be considered. The hygiene hypothesis posits that the rise in autoimmune and atopic diseases in the twentieth century arises from the decrease in exposure to microbial environmental factors that co-evolved wit...

The isotopic composition of U in nature is generally assumed to be invariant. Here, we report variations of the U/U isotope ratio in natural samples (basalts, granites, seawater, corals, black shales, suboxic sediments, ferromanganese crusts/ nodules and BIFs) of 1.3‰, exceeding by far the analytical precision of our method ( 0.06‰, 2SD). U isotopes were analyzed with MC-ICP-MS using a mixed U–...

TREE-MAKER was designed as a tool for generating and rendering realistic images of trees. Each tree is created from a tree template that specifies simple branching rules and leaf definitions. Many different types of trees may be created by varying the parameters of the template. The flexibility provided by this approach makes it suitable for users who are not familiar with programming technique...

Storage proteins in cotyledons of legume plants are degraded by proteinases after germination. We examined whether abscisic acid (ABA), gibberellin (GA) and brassinosteroid (BR) are involved in the expression of cysteine proteinases in cotyledons of common bean seeds with RNA blotting using cDNAs for five papain-like proteinases, EP-C1, CP1, CP2, CP3, CP4 and two legumain-like proteinases, LLP1...

We use the PISA student-level achievement database to estimate international education production functions. Student characteristics, family backgrounds, home inputs, resources, teachers and institutions are all significantly related to math, science and reading achievement. Our models account for more than 85 percent of the between-country performance variation, with roughly 25 percent accruin...

We examined motives for adopting and maintaining yoga practice in a national survey of yoga practitioners (360 yoga students, 156 yoga teachers). Both students and teachers adopted yoga practice primarily for exercise and stress relief, but reported many other reasons, including flexibility, getting into shape, and depression/anxiety relief. Over 62 percent of students and 85 percent of teacher...