B etween 1986 and 1998, the price of a barrel of West Texas Intermediate (WTI) oil remained quite stable, fluctuating between $16 and $42 constant 2011-U.S. dollars, with the exception of a brief spike in 1990 at the time of the first Gulf War. In December 1998, the barrel of WTI had reached a low point of $17. Almost 10 years later, in July 2008, the same barrel cost $134. By March 2009, the p...

BACKGROUND Persian Gulf is an exposed and stressed area as a result of oil pollution and other fossil fuels containing PAHs. The susceptibility of using mudskippers to monitor marine pollution, like PAHs, points to the fact that mudskippers are able to accumulate and record the PAHs presented in the coastal environments. METHODS Polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) were examined in the coa...

New record and new species of the families Melitidae Bousfield, 1973 and Maeridae Krapp-Schickel, 2008 are described from the Iranian shorelines of the Persian Gulf. Melita persia sp. nov. is differentiated from other members of M. zeylanica Stebbing, 1904 group by: the presence of two setae on inner ramus of third uropod, the setal arrangement on the telson, and a recurved proximal lobe of six...

Two new species of Palapedia Ng, 1993, are described based on material collected from Abu-Musa Island, Persian Gulf during the present study, from Bahrain by the 1937/38 Danish Expedition, and from the Saudi Arabian coast of the Persian Gulf by Michael Apel in 1992-1995. Palapedia persica n. sp. is distinguishable from its congeners by having distinctly large denticles on the upper margin of th...

This chapter evaluates available data bearing directly on the possible role of exposure to potentially stressful conditions as an etiologic factor in the health problems of veterans of the Persian Gulf War. After describing our method for identifying relevant studies and briefly characterizing different approaches used by these studies to measure stress exposure and health outcomes, this chapte...

BACKGROUND: Factor analysis is one of the most used statistical techniques to analyze the inter-relationships among symptoms reported by Gulf War veterans. The objective of this study was to apply factor analyses to binary symptom data from the UK study of Gulf War illness and the US Air Force study of Gulf War veterans, and to compare the symptom domains derived from the distinct samples. METH...

This is the first longitudinal cohort study of Persian Gulf War US soldiers to examine belief in exposure to chemical and biological weapons before and shortly after combat. A longitudinal sample of n = 1250 male Persian Gulf War US Army soldiers were surveyed 3 to 4 months before and 6 to 10 months after the 1991 War. Six to 10 months after combat, 4.6% of the cohort believed they had been exp...

Knotted proteins are more commonly observed in recent years due to the enormously growing number of structures in the Protein Data Bank (PDB). Studies show that the knot regions contribute to both ligand binding and enzyme activity in proteins such as the chromophore-binding domain of phytochrome, ketol–acid reductoisomerase or SpoU methyltransferase. However, there are still many misidentified...