Recently, a great deal of effort has been concentrated in the area of preventive dentistry. Among the many products to evolve from this effort are materials designed to obtund and to seal occlusal pits and fissures from the ingress of saliva and food particles. Topical and systemic fluoride treatments have proven effective in the reduction of smooth surface caries, but have shown little or no e...

Recent studies have suggested that species-specific pit properties such as pit membrane thickness, pit membrane porosity, torus-to-aperture diameter ratio and pit chamber depth influence xylem vulnerability to cavitation. Despite the indisputable importance of using mean pit characteristics, considerable variability in pit structure within a single species or even within a single pit field shou...

The Galería de las Estatuas is a Mousterian site located within the Cueva Mayor-Cueva del Silo karstic system at Sierra Atapuerca (Burgos, Spain). This characterised by an important Upper Pleistocene stratigraphic sequence in which large number of lithic artefacts exhibiting clear affinities and rich assemblage faunal remains have been found. Additionally, this has yielded foot phalanx Neandert...

This work aims at a virtual recovery of excavated archaeological finds in cyberspace for ancient relic preservation, archaeology research, and multimedia material generation. Many excavated pottery artifacts have already suffered from a certain degree of damage when they are discovered. Archaeologists have to spend much time in restoring broken pieces before an unearthed object can be displayed...

One of the main concerns of the mining industry is to determine ultimate pit limits. Final pit is a collection of blocks, which can be removed with maximum profit while following restrictions on the slope of the mine’s walls. The size, location and final shape of an open-pit are very important in designing the location of waste dumps, stockpiles, processing plants, access roads and other surfac...

Pavlovian conditioned stimuli can influence instrumental responding, an effect called Pavlovian-instrumental transfer (PIT). During the last decade, PIT has been subdivided into two types: specific PIT and general PIT, each having its own neural substrates. Specific PIT happens when a conditioned stimulus (CS) associated with a reward enhances an instrumental response directed to the same rewar...

BACKGROUND Endostatin is a C-terminal fragment of collagen XVIII which is a component of basement membranes with the structural properties of both collagens and proteoglycans. Endostatin has a major role in angiogenesis which is intimately associated with bone development and remodeling. Signaling between the endothelial cells and the bone cells, for example, may have a role in recruitment of o...

PURPOSE The aim of the present study was to assess the microleakage of pit and fissure sealants in: 1) air-abraded molars with and without etching and 2) in preventive resin restorations (PRR) prepared with air abrasion or mechanically with a bur. METHODS Forty molars with no or minimal occlusal caries were cleaned with pumice, washed, and assigned to four groups of 10 teeth each. In group A,...

This paper investigates the performance of several out-ofthe-box solvers for mixed-integer quadratically constrained programmes (MIQCPs) on an open pit mine production scheduling problem with mixing constraints. We compare the solvers BARON, Couenne, SBB, and SCIP to a problem-specific algorithm on two different MIQCP formulations. The computational results presented show that general-purpose s...

Sungun Copper Mine is located in an area with a high level of seismic hazard. Most recently, the Ahar-Varzeqan earthquake with a magnitude of 6.2 on Richter scale occurred on August 11, 2012; at a distance about 40 kilometers away from the mine. Nevertheless, the seismic stability of the final pit wall has not been comprehensively reviewed. In this research, the southwestern wall of the final p...