abstract   background: amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (als) is a progressive neurological disorder with high mortality and morbidity. some risk factors have been implicated for als such as exposure to high magnetic fields, and trace elements like selenium, cadmium and lead. afew studies have been carried out throughout the world to evaluate the prevalence of als among veterans. this study was ai...

This paper examines urbanization trends, the growth of Colombo and its present state of development. It looks at the approaches to the planned interventions in the city and demonstrates how a uni-directional urban development has had a detrimental impact upon healthy growth and quality of life in a city where half of the population still live in slums and shanties. It shows that the city has be...

Toughness is a complex material characteristic that is viewed from multiple aspects and is influenced by numerous factors. It is very important to have ability to assess toughness, i.e. to determine ductile or brittle material behaviour at any specific time. Beside total impact energy obtained at Charpy instrumented pendulum, the use of additional parameters such as lateral extension measuremen...

OBJECTIVE Knee ligament injuries frequently cause devastating impairment to the injured. In car-pedestrian impact accidents, lateral-medial shear displacement is one of principal mechanisms of knee ligament injuries. The current study aims to investigate injury thresholds of knee ligaments under lateral-medial shear loading to improve pedestrian safety. METHODS Ten isolated human knee joints ...

Plants maintain capacity to form new organs such as leaves, flowers, lateral shoots and roots throughout their postembryonic lifetime. Lateral roots (LRs) originate from a few pericycle cells that acquire attributes of founder cells (FCs), undergo series of anticlinal divisions, and give rise to a few short initial cells. After initiation, coordinated cell division and differentiation occur, gi...

Bilateral transtibial amputee (BTA) gait has been investigated less and is not as well understood compared to that of their unilateral counterparts. Relative to able-bodied individuals, BTAs walk with reduced self-selected speeds, increased step width, hip-hiking, and greater metabolic cost. The clinically observed upper body motions of these individuals have not been quantified, but appear sub...

This paper examines maturational changes in the spatiotemporal features of central and lateral N1 components of the auditory evoked potentials (AEPs) to tone stimuli presented with a long stimulus onset asyncrony (SOA; 4200 ms) using the scalp current density (SCD) technique. A group of typically developing children ranging from 6 to 12 years of age and a group of adults were studied. Recently ...

The objective of this study is to develop a post-impact vehicle stability control system that regulates both heading angle and lateral deviation from the original driving path, so that the severity of possible subsequent (secondary) crashes can be reduced. To characterize the vehicle motion after a crash event, an impact force estimation method and a vehicle motion prediction scheme are propose...

A new technique named as model predictive spread acceleration guidance (MPSAG) is proposed in this paper. It combines nonlinear model predictive control and spread acceleration guidance philosophies. This technique is then used to design a nonlinear suboptimal guidance law for a constant speed missile against stationary target with impact angle constraint. MPSAG technique can be applied to a cl...