An old question in theoretical cosmology is whether an infinitely oscillatory universe which avoids an initial singularity can be consistently constructed. As realized by Friedmann and especially by Tolman one principal obstacle is the second law of thermodynamics which dictates that the entropy increases from cycle to cycle. If the cycles thereby become longer, extrapolation into the past will...

This paper aims to explain the global expansion of the Rip Curl and Quiksilver surfing brands through the lens of Michael Porter’s cluster theory of comparative advantage (Porter, 1998). According to Porter, a cluster of linked businesses can generate commercial synergies and strengths that enable it to achieve a global presence even when it is geographically distant from the major world market...

STUDY OBJECTIVES To evaluate the ability of chest wall EMG (CW-EMG) using surface electrodes to classify apneas as obstructive, mixed, or central compared to classification using dual channel uncalibrated respiratory inductance plethysmography (RIP). METHODS CW-EMG was recorded from electrodes in the eighth intercostal space at the right mid-axillary line. Consecutive adult clinical sleep stu...

Cerebral ischemia is a leading cause of death and disability. A previous study indicated that remote ischemic postconditioning (RIP) in the treatment of cerebral ischemia reduces ischemia/reperfusion (I/R) injury. However, the underlying mechanism is not well understood. In the present study, the authors hypothesized that the protective effect of RIP on neurological damage is mediated by exosom...

Ribosome-inactivating proteins (RIPs) are toxic because they bind to 28S rRNA and depurinate a specific adenine residue from the α-sarcin/ricin loop (SRL), thereby inhibiting protein synthesis. Shiga-like toxins (Stx1 and Stx2), produced by Escherichia coli, are RIPs that cause outbreaks of foodborne diseases with significant morbidity and mortality. Ricin, produced by the castor bean plant, is...

Progeny of two transgenic tobacco (Nicotiana tabacum L.) lines that expressed an activated form of maize (Zea mays L.) ribosome-inactivating protein (RIP) had varying resistance to the insect species tested. A subset of R(2) plants from the two lines appeared to be more resistant to larvae of the cigarette beetle, Lasioderma serricorne (F.), and the tobacco hornworm, Manduca sexta (L.) than the...

Internet routing infrastructures are vulnerable to various attacks due to the lack of strong authentication mechanisms, software vulnerabilities/misconfiguration, and the risky assumption of a trustworthy and cooperative environment. Existing solutions do not solve the problem because they neither validate factual correctness of routing updates nor support incremental deployment. In this paper,...

Clusters of genes in co-expression networks are commonly used as functional units for gene set enrichment detection and increasingly as features (attribute construction) for statistical inference and sample classification. One of the practical challenges of clustering for these purposes is to identify an optimal partition of the network where the individual clusters are neither too large, prohi...

Respiratory inductive plethysmography (RIP) can be used to obtain a valid measure of tidal volume in humans. This device also compares the contributions to ventilation of the thorax and abdomen. Although thoracoabdominal asynchrony is a prominent clinical feature for patients with airway obstruction, the accuracy of the RIP device to assess the severity of obstruction is unclear. This study ana...

We present a novel method to measure the local GC-content bias in genomes and a survey of published fungal species. The method, enacted as "OcculterCut" (https://sourceforge.net/projects/occultercut, last accessed April 30, 2016), identified species containing distinct AT-rich regions. In most fungal taxa, AT-rich regions are a signature of repeat-induced point mutation (RIP), which targets rep...