Background Egg yolk is the main cryoprotectant agent in semen freezing extenders which is used in order to protect spermatozoa against cold shock. However elimination of animal bioproducts from the cryopreservation protocol is becoming mandatory. Therefore the aim of this study is to compare a previously studied homemade soya bean lecithin based extender with a commercially available extender f...

When conducting research in the area of bone health, accurate measurement of calcium intake is crucial. The rapid assessment method (RAM) is one technique that has frequently been used for its measurement of calcium intake. However, the RAM and other currently established questionnaires lack the assessment of dietary supplement use, which is common for athletes. Our objective was to evaluate th...

Learned vocalizations, such as bird song, require intricate coordination of vocal and respiratory muscles. Although the neural basis for this coordination remains poorly understood, it likely includes direct synaptic interactions between respiratory premotor neurons and vocal motor neurons. In birds, as in mammals, the medullary nucleus retroambigualis (RAm) receives synaptic input from higher ...

OBJECTIVE The glycoprotein (GP) Ib-V-IX complex regulates the adhesion, activation, and procoagulant activity of platelets. We previously reported that RAM.1, a rat monoclonal antibody directed against the extracellular domain of mouse GPIbβ, diminished adhesion of platelets and chinese hamster ovary cells transfected with the human GPIb-IX complex to von Willebrand factor under flow conditions...

Eukaryotic gene expression is dependent on the modification of the first transcribed nucleotide of pre-mRNA by the addition of the 7-methylguanosine cap. The cap protects transcripts from exonucleases and recruits complexes which mediate transcription elongation, processing and translation initiation. The cap is synthesized by a series of reactions which link 7-methylguanosine to the first tran...

BACKGROUND Venous thromboembolism is a common condition in hospitalized medical patients. Numerous studies have demonstrated that low molecular weight heparin significantly reduces this risk but, despite this, the use of thromboprophylaxis remains poor. AIM To evaluate the use of an exclusion based risk-assessment model (RAM) for venous thrombosis in improving the uptake of appropriate thromb...

BACKGROUND Risk assessment models (RAMs) may allow the clinician to determine need for deep vein thrombosis (DVT) prophylaxis. Individual healthcare facilities often develop their own RAMs. The purpose of this study was to determine: 1.) inter-RAM variability in DVT risk factors and contraindications; 2.) inter-rater variability and inter-RAM variability when applying a RAM to a standard case; ...

Pervasive computing introduces data management requirements that must be tackled in a growing variety of lightweight computing devices. Personal folders on chip, networks of sensors and data hosted by autonomous mobile computers are different illustrations of the need for evaluating queries confined in hardware constrained computing devices. RAM is the most limiting factor in this context. This...

An SDDS-2000 server currently manages only buckets in its RAM storage [C01]. Several buckets can coexist. When many files are created however, RAM storage space may not be sufficient for all the buckets simultaneously. When an application requests a bucket, but there is not enough room in RAM for it, one can evict some buckets to the disk. We define a number of promising eviction strategies. Ou...

Common presentations of the NP-completeness of SAT suffer from two drawbacks which hinder the scope of this flagship result. First, they do not apply to machines equipped with random-access memory, also known as direct-access memory, even though this feature is critical in basic algorithms. Second, they incur a quadratic blow-up in parameters, even though the distinction between, say, linear an...