The Urban Heat Island (UHI) phenomenon prevalently concerns industrialized countries. It consists of a significant increase in temperatures, especially in industrialized and urbanized areas, in particular, during extreme warm periods like summer. This paper explores the climate variability of temperatures in two stations located in Matera city (Southern Italy), evaluating the increase in temper...

Two forms of Ca2+-dependent cysteine proteinase (calpain, EC 3.4.22.17) and their specific endogenous inhibitor (calpastatin) were partially purified from porcine retina: calpain I (low-Ca2+-requiring form) was half-maximally activated at 8 microM-Ca2+, and calpain II (high-Ca2+-requiring form) at 250 microM-Ca2+. Both calpain I and calpain II were inhibited by calpastatin. Calpain I from porci...

This survey study investigated whether viewer perceptions of reality programs’ authenticity were associated with involvement, enjoyment, and perceived learning. Four dimensions of perceived authenticity were identified: cast eccentricity, representativeness, candidness, and producer manipulation. Perceptions that the cast was not eccentric, that they were representative of people the respondent...

Guy Desaulniers and Daniel Villenueve The problem considered involves finding the minimum cost path, with cost and time being two independent quantities that govern the shortest path. In this problem, each arc is associated with a cost of traversing the arc as well as the time required to traverse it and each node is associated with a lower bound and an upper bound on the time of departure from...

CAST-128 and CAST-256 are two symmetric algorithms designed by Adams in 1990s. Both of them adopt the CAST design procedure which makes them process a number of desirable cryptographic. CAST-128 is notably used as the default cipher in some versions of GNU Privacy Guard (GPG) and Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) systems. As an extension of CAST-128, CAST-256 was submitted as a candidate for the Advanc...

The inhibitory domains of calpastatin contain three highly conserved regions, A, B, and C, of which A and C bind calpain in a strictly Ca(2+)-dependent manner but have no inhibitory activity whereas region B inhibits calpain on its own. We synthesized the 19-mer oligopeptides corresponding to regions A and C of human calpastatin domain I and tested their effect on human erythrocyte mu-calpain a...

This paper describes a new diierential-style attack, which we call the boomerang attack. This attack has several interesting applications. First, we disprove the oft-repeated claim that eliminating all high-probability diierentials for the whole cipher is suucient to guarantee security against diierential attacks. Second, we show how to break COCONUT98, a cipher designed using decorrelation tec...

Introduction Laboratories often modify procedures recommended by the European Urinalysis Guidelines for urine sediment analysis. The aim of this study was to compare the recommended protocol with our routine laboratory procedure and to evaluate the possible impact of modifications in the relative centrifugal force, type of tube, method of supernatant aspiration and urine volume on patient's res...

Microalloyed cast steels are a group of microalloyed steels in which reliable mechanical properties could be achieved by heat treatment. In this work, the heat treatment processes were carried out on the cast specimens as the step samples by different thicknesses and Zr content. The results show that after homogenization, variations in thickness have no effect on the hardness. Also, after hea...