Debit cards have become an indispensable part of the U.S. payments system, accounting for more than a third of consumer payments at point of sale. With this development has come controversy: Card networks charge merchants fees that merchants believe are too high. And most of the fees are ad valorem—that is, based on transaction value—rather than fixed fees per transaction. Merchants are critica...

Exogenous insulin treatment has been shown to improve food intake and host weight of cachectic tumor-bearing (TB) rats, but the composition of the host weight gain has not been quantitated. Sixty-six Fischer 344 rats were randomized to seven groups: early nontumor-bearing (NTB) (n = 10) who underwent compositional analysis (CA) on the day the methylcholanthrene sarcoma was implanted in TB rats;...

Economic theory states that on market with imperfect competition, per unit consumption taxes should induce a larger increase of prices than ad valorem consumption taxes. It implies that consumers bear a larger share of the tax burden for per unit consumption taxes than for ad valorem consumption taxes. The present paper aims at testing empirically this theoretical result. It uses the French mar...

A series of manganese(II) tris(2-benzimidazolylmethyl)amine (ntb) complexes were synthesized and characterized. In these complexes, ntb functions as a tripodal tetradentate ligand, resulting in trigonal pyramidal geometry. The complexes have five- to seven-coordinate manganese(II) ions depending on the additional ligand used. In each complex, an additional ligand, chloride anion, acetate anion,...

X-linked lymphoproliferative disease (XLP) is a rare congenital immunodeficiency that leads to an extreme, usually fatal increase in the number of lymphocytes upon infection with EBV. It is most commonly defined molecularly by loss of expression of SLAM-associated protein (SAP). Despite this, there is little understanding of how SAP deficiency causes lymphocytosis following EBV infection. Here ...

Little is known about the effect of management practices on net global warming potential (GWP) and greenhouse gas intensity (GHGI) that account for all sources and sinks of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in dryland cropping systems. The objective of this study was to compare the effect of a combination of tillage, cropping system, and N fertilization on GWP and GHGI under dryland cropping syste...

Activation of natural killer cells can be mediated by different receptors. Stimulation of the receptors 2B4, NTB-A and CRACC, members of the SLAM-related receptor family, induces cytotoxicity and cytokine production. The surface expression of 2B4 and other activating natural killer cell receptors is down-modulated after receptor engagement, which results in a weaker response to consecutive stim...

The NTB-VPg protein of Tomato ringspot nepovirus is an integral membrane protein found in association with endoplasmic reticulum (ER)-derived membranes active in virus replication. A transmembrane helix present in a hydrophobic region at the C terminus of the NTB domain was previously shown to traverse the membranes, resulting in the translocation of the VPg domain in the lumen. We have now con...

This paper investigates a puzzle and possible policy concern: Why do platforms such as eBay and Visa that enable the trade of goods of different unobserved costs and valuations rely predominantly on linear ad-valorem fees, that is, fees that increase in proportion to the sale price of the trades that they enable? Under a broad class of demand functions, we show that a linear ad-valorem fee sche...

Narrowband-to-broadband conversion is a critical procedure for mapping land-surface broadband albedo using multi-spectral narrowband remote-sensing observations. Due to the significant difference in optical characteristics between soil and vegetation, NTB conversion is influenced by the variation in vegetation coverage on different surface types. To reduce this influence, this paper applies an ...