BACKGROUND Extrinsic staining of teeth may result from the deposition of a variety of pigments into or onto the tooth surface, which originate mainly from diet or from tobacco use. More recently, clinical studies have demonstrated the efficacy of some chewing gums in removing extrinsic tooth staining. The aim of this study was to assess the effectiveness of two nicotine medicated chewing gums (...

The direct detection of gravitational waves is a major goal of current astrophysics. We provide details of a new method for detecting a stochastic background of gravitational waves using pulsar timing data. Our results show that regular timing observations of 40 pulsars each with a timing accuracy of 100 ns will be able to make a direct detection of the predicted stochastic background from coal...

In this paper it is shown how estimates of local structure and orientation can be obtained using a set of spherically separable quadrature lters. The method is applicable to signals of any dimensionality the only requirement being that the lter set spans the corresponding orientation space. The estimates produced are 2:nd order tensors, the size of the tensors corresponding to the dimensionalit...

Titanium dioxide has been used in various industrial and cosmetic applications due to its unique elemental properties. This substance has a refractive index higher than most other compounds (n = 2.6142, in comparison to water at 20°C n = 1.33). This allows titanium dioxide to have an iridescent and bright quality. It has been used in the cosmetics industry for “whitening” and “thickening” in mu...

This paper aims at obtaining performance limitations of state estimation in terms of variance minimization (minimum variance estimation and filtering) using information theory. Two new notions, negentropy rate and Gaussianity-whiteness measure (joint Shannon-Wiener entropy), are proposed to facilitate the analysis. Topics such as Gaussianing-whitening filter (the maximum Gaussianity-whiteness m...

This study presents a comprehensive assessment of the variability and trends of the precipitation and temperature along with the trends in drought indices over the State of California. The non-parametric Mann–Kendall trend test is applied with a trend-free pre-whitening procedure in trend identification. A dataset containing 120-year (water years 1896–2015) monthly precipitation, average temper...

For screening of skin-whitening ingredients that modulate inhibition of melanogenesis, tyrosinase promoter-based assay using a three-dimensional (3D) spheroid culture technique is a beneficial tool to improve the accuracy of raw material screening in cosmetics through mimicking of the in vivo microenvironment. Although the advantages of high-throughput screening (HTS) are widely known, there ha...