We focused on a region encompassing a major maize domestication locus, Tb1, and a locus involved in the flowering time variation, Dwarf8 (D8), to investigate the consequences of two closely linked selective sweeps on nucleotide variation and gain some insights into maize geographical diffusion, through climate adaptation. First, we physically mapped D8 at approximately 300 kb 3' of Tb1. Second,...

Up to now chiral type IIA vacua have been mostly based on intersecting D6-branes wrapping special Lagrangian 3-cycles on a CY3 manifold. We argue that there are additional BPS Dbranes which have so far been neglected, and which seem to have interesting model-building features. They are coisotropic D8-branes, in the sense of Kapustin and Orlov. The D8-branes wrap 5-dimensional submanifolds of th...

The purpose of this study was to determine if breakfast macronutrient composition improved thermic effect of feeding (TEF) and appetite after a one-week adaptation in young women who habitually skip breakfast. A randomized, controlled study was conducted in females (24.1 ± 2 years), who skip breakfast (≥5 times/week). Participants were placed into one of three groups for eight days (n = 8 per g...

This study was to explore the mechanism of acupuncture on regulating the endometrial angiogenesis and uterus dendritic cells (uDCs) during the peri-implantation period. Rats, in early pregnancy, were randomized into five groups: normal (N), model (M), acupuncture (A), progesterone (P), and A + P groups. The COH model was established using pregnant mare serum, combined with human chorionic gonad...

We compute the Fadell-Husseini index of the dihedral group D8 = (Z2)2 ⋊ Z2 on S × S, that is, the kernel of the map in equivariant cohomology H ∗ D8 (pt,F2) −→ H ∗ D8 (Sd × Sd,F2). This establishes the complete cohomological lower bound for the two hyperplane case of Grünbaum’s 1960 mass partition problem: For which d and j can two hyperplanes be found that cut j arbitrary measures on R into fo...

We address a few subtle issues regarding the interacting D0-D8 system. There are two existing interpretations for the counter-intuitive non-vanishing attractive cylinder-diagram R-R potential. We improve them each by properly dealing with the divergence of potential in the R-R as well as the NS-NS sector, which has been ignored so far. We further test them by considering the D8 to carry a flux,...

The microbial community in the human colon contains bacteria that reduce cholesterol to coprostanol, but the species responsible for this conversion are still unknown. We describe here the first isolation and characterization of a cholesterol-reducing bacterium of human intestinal origin. Strain D8 was isolated from a 10(-8) dilution of a fresh stool sample provided by a senior male volunteer w...