The first issue of Thorax was published 32 years ago. Until recently, the journal was owned by the British Medical Association but its contents and editorial policy were controlled by the Thoracic Society. From the beginning of this year, as a result of a new agreement, Thorax will be owned jointly by the British Medical Association and the Thoracic Society. We hope that our readers will take p...

This study revisits the issue of tonal registers by exploring the cues used in producing and perceiving the five level tones of Black Miao. Both production and perception experiments show that non-modal phonations are very important cues for tonal contrasts. Two different kinds of non-modal phonations that either enhance pitch contrasts or provide an additional contrastive cue divide tonal leve...

Neurons in the dorsal cochlear nucleus (DCN) exhibit nonlinearities in spectral processing, which make it difficult to predict the neurons' responses to stimuli. Here, we consider two possible sources of nonlinearity: nonmonotonic responses as sound level increases due to inhibition and interactions between frequency components. A spectral weighting function model of rate responses is used; the...

Neurons in the dorsal cochlear nucleus (DCN) exhibit nonlinearities in spectral processing, which make it difficult to predict the neurons' responses to stimuli. Here, we consider two possible sources of nonlinearity: non-monotonic responses as sound level increases due to inhibition; and interactions between frequency components. A spectral weighting function model of rate responses is used; t...

Introduction: Myocardial perfusion imaging is a nuclear medicine imaging method that is used to detect coronary artery diseases. One of the main sources of error in this imaging method is the detection of Compton scattered photons in the photopeak energy window used for data acquisition. This results in the degradation of the image contrast, and therefore decreases the...

The current study explores for the first time contrasts and similarities between elemental (Na, Mg, Fe, Ni, Cu, Zn, Pb) composition of pines that grow in a polluted industrialized area, located close to steelworks, growing comparative site, far from industry. Radial trace element profiles were determined by LA-ICPMS. results are compared with rainfall load at monitoring station Katowice, neares...