Synthetic musk fragrance compounds, such as polycyclic musks (PCMs), are a group of chemicals used extensively as personal care products, and can be found in the environment and the human body. PCMs, such as 1,3,4,6,7,8-hexahydro-4,6,6,7,8,8-hexa-methylcyclopenta-gamma-2-benzopyran (HHCB) and 7-acetyl-1,1,3,4,4,6-hexamethyltetralin (AHTN), are known to have agonistic activities toward human est...

BACKGROUND AND STUDY AIMS Benign biliary strictures (BBS) may occur in patients with chronic pancreatitis and may lead to secondary biliary cirrhosis or recurrent cholangitis. Although surgical diversion may provide definitive therapy, it can be associated with significant morbidity. Endoscopic therapy with plastic stents has been used as an alternative to surgery but has resulted in unsatisfac...

Many structural comparison methods of proteins have been proposed [2,3,4,5]. Among them, distance matrices, approximation of structure, and vector representation are the most commonly used. The distance matrices, also called distance plots or distance maps, contain all the pair-wise distances between alpha-carbon atoms, i.e. Cα atoms of each residue [3]. A matrix is a twodimensional (2D) repres...

The majority of plasma cell myelomas (PCMs) are positive for CD200, a membrane protein with immunosuppressive function. There are no flow cytometry data in the literature on plasma cell CD200 expression in other immunoproliferative disorders. Therefore we used flow cytometry to study the expression of CD200 on plasma cells in diagnostic bone marrow aspirates from 61 patients with monoclonal gam...

Recovery of lower-limb function after spinal cord injury (SCI) likely depends on transmission in the corticospinal pathway. Here, we examined whether paired corticospinal-motoneuronal stimulation (PCMS) changes transmission at spinal synapses of lower-limb motoneurons in humans with chronic incomplete SCI and aged-matched controls. We used 200 pairs of stimuli where corticospinal volleys evoked...

Light envelopes are more and more frequently used in modern buildings but they do not present sufficient thermal inertia. A solution to increase this inertia is to incorporate a phase change material (PCM) in this envelope. This paper presents the performance of a test-cell with a new structure of light wallboards containing PCMs submitted to climatic variation and a comparison is made with a t...

Recently, the utility of modern phylogenetic comparative methods (PCMs) has been questioned because of the seemingly restrictive assumptions required by these methods. Although most comparative analyses involve traits thought to be undergoing natural or sexual selection, most PCMs require an assumption that the traits be evolving by less directed random processes, such as Brownian motion (BM). ...

Over the past 15 years, phylogenetic comparative methods (PCMs) have become standard in the study of life-history evolution. To date, most studies have focused on variation among species or higher taxonomic levels, generally revealing the presence of significant phylogenetic effects as well as residual variation potentially attributable to adaptive evolution. Recently, population-level phylogen...

Phase change materials (PCMs) are drawing increasing attention of researchers nowadays, and they play a pivotal role in thermal energy storage (TES) used in renewable energy resources applications, since these renewable energy, such as solar energy, wind energy and tidal energy, are intermittent and not available at any time. However, most of PCMs suffer from low thermal conductivities prolongi...

Phase change materials (PCMs) have been used in various fields including the materials of buildings. In this research, mixed shape-stabilized PCMs (Mixed SSPCMs) were prepared by impregnating coconut oil and n-hexadecane into exfoliated graphite nanoplatelets (xGnP) through a vacuum impregnate method. Coconut oil is fatty acid ester PCM which is relatively economical in comparison to other PCMs...