BACKGROUND Aluminum is considered to be a relatively safe metal for humans. However, there are some reports that aluminum can be toxic to humans and animals. In order to estimate the toxicity of aluminum with respect to humans, we measured the aluminum concentration in urine of aluminum-handling and non-handling workers and investigated the relationships between their urinary aluminum concentra...

The Aluminum Hypothesis, the idea that aluminum exposure is involved in the etiology of Alzheimer disease, dates back to a 1965 demonstration that aluminum causes neurofibrillary tangles in the brains of rabbits. Initially the focus of intensive research, the Aluminum Hypothesis has gradually been abandoned by most researchers. Yet, despite this current indifference, the Aluminum Hypothesis con...

Silex Microsystems, a pure play MEMS foundry, offers a high density through silicon via technology that enables MEMS designs with significantly reduced form factor. The Through Silicon Via (TSV) process developed by Silex offers sub 50 μm pitch for through wafer connections in up to 600 μm thick substrates. Silex via process enables “all silicon” MEMS designs and true "Wafer Level Packaging" fe...

In this paper, we present a concrete proof point, achieved after roughly two years of collaborative effort, resulting in substantially decreased time-to-silicon and improved semiconductor customer success. We describe a foundry package containing a unique Cadence evaluation test chip, available today, and fabricated using the 0.18um CMOS Tower Semiconductor process design kit, Tower standard-ce...

Environmental concerns, stricter legislation and inflated energy costs together yield improved energy efficiency as an important pillar in every industrial sector. Mindful of this challenge, energy management and its related practices are deemed to be one of the major instruments to improve energy efficiency within manufacturing companies. Despite the importance of this issue, there is no preci...

Representing the kinetic state of a patient (posture, motion, and ac‐ tivity) during vital sign measurement is an important part of continu‐ ous monitoring applications, especially remote monitoring applica‐ tions. In contextualized vital sign representation, the measurement result is presented in conjunction with salient measurement context metadata. We present an automated annotation system f...