BACKGROUND AND AIM OF THE STUDY Between January 1, 1997 and December 31, 2001, a total of 342 patients underwent aortic valve replacement (AVR) or mitral valve replacement (MVR) with the ATS Medical prosthesis. The initial three-year phase of this study took place under a United States Food and Drug Administration-approved investigational device exemption study. The study aim was to determine t...

Temperature, precipitation and wind extremes over Europe are examined in an ensemble of RCA3 regional climate model simulations driven by six different global climate models (ECHAM5, CCSM3, HadCM3, CNRM, BCM and IPSL) under the SRES A1B emission scenario. The extremes are expressed in terms of the 20-yr return values of annual temperature and wind extremes and seasonal precipitation extremes. T...

In the alpine steppe zone on the Central Tibetan Plateau, a large amount of area has been degraded due to natural and artificial factors. N & P fertilization is widely accepted to recover degraded pastures in other regions all over the world. However, it is not clear how alpine steppe communities respond to N & P fertilization, and what is the optimal application rate, in the perspective of for...

Winds from massive stars supply ≈ 10 −3 M ⊙ yr −1 of gas to the central parsec of the Galactic Center. Spherically symmetric hydrodynamic calculations show that ≈ 1% of this gas, or ≈ 10 −5 M ⊙ yr −1 , flows in towards the central massive black hole Sgr A*; the remaining gas, ≈ 10 −3 M ⊙ yr −1 , is thermally driven out of the central star cluster in a wind. This dynamical model accounts for the...

Abstract. River deltas, with their mosaic of ponds, channels and seasonally inundated areas, act as the last continental hot spots carbon turnover along land–ocean aquatic continuum. There is increasing evidence for important role riparian wetlands in transformation emission terrestrial to atmosphere. The considerable spatial heterogeneity river however, forms a major obstacle quantifying emiss...

Abstract Oil palm plantation (OPP) expands to soil with less suitable including Ultisol. The purposes of this study were (1) compare some selected properties among various OPP ages and (2) determine the correlation properties. A Completely Randomized Block Design single factor treatments oil age consisting 2-yr, 3 -yr, 4-yr, 8-yr, 32-yr OPP, all was repeated three times. Blocking based on floor...

An attempt is made to synthesize the current understanding of the impact of Russian forests on the global carbon (C) budget for the period 1961–1998 (37 years), based on a detailed inventory of pools and fluxes in 1988–1992, and a historical reconstruction of a full forest carbon budget for 1961–1998. All major intermediate indicators of the budget (phytomass, net primary production, impact of ...

The high uncertainty in land-based CO2 fluxes estimates is thought to be mainly due to uncertainty in not only quantifying historical changes among forests, croplands, and grassland, but also due to different processes included in calculation methods. Inclusion of a nitrogen (N) cycle in models is fairly recent and strongly affects carbon (C) fluxes. In this study, for the first time, we use a ...