Urban infrastructure, such as bridges, roads and buildings, is constructed from a complex 16 mixture of construction materials including concrete, metals, ceramics and plastics. The 17 creation and operation of this infrastructure requires building activities (referring here to 18 construction, refurbishment, demolition and recycling) over the life cycle of individual assets. 19 Such building–r...

We study some linear programming relaxations for the Unsplittable Flow problem on trees (UFPtree). Inspired by results obtained by Chekuri, Ene, and Korula for Unsplittable Flow on paths (UFP-path), we present a relaxation with polynomially many constraints that has an integrality gap bound of O(logn ·min{logm, logn}) where n denotes the number of tasks and m denotes the number of edges in the ...

BACKGROUND Diabetes confers an increased risk for cardiovascular effects of airborne particles. OBJECTIVE We hypothesized that inhalation of elemental carbon ultrafine particles (UFP) would activate blood platelets and vascular endothelium in people with type 2 diabetes. METHODS In a randomized, double-blind, crossover trial, 19 subjects with type 2 diabetes inhaled filtered air or 50 µg/m³...

Simultaneous measurements of ultrafine particles (UFPs) were carried out at four sampling locations situated within a 1 km(2) grid area in a Belgian city, Borgerhout (Antwerp). All sampling sites had different orientation and height of buildings and dissimilar levels of anthropogenic activities (mainly traffic volume). The aims were to investigate: (i) the spatio-temporal variation of UFP withi...

There is evidence of adverse health impacts from human exposure to traffic-related ultrafine particulate matter pollution. As more commuters are spending a significant portion of their daily routine inside vehicles, it is increasingly relevant to study exposure levels to harmful pollutants inside the vehicle microenvironment. This study is one of the first research efforts to combine detailed f...

Gaussian process regression is used to predict ultrafine particle (UFP) number concentrations. We infer their number concentrations based on the concentrations of NO, NO2, CO and O3 at half hour and five minutes resolution. Because UFP number concentrations follow from a dynamic process, we have used a non-stationary kernel based on the addition of a linear and a rational quadratic kernel. Simu...

We consider two extremal problems in hypergraphs. First, given k ≥ 3 and k-partite k-uniform hypergraphs, as a generalization of graph (k = 2) matchings, we determine the partite minimum codegree threshold for matchings with at most one vertex left in each part, thereby answering a problem asked by Rödl and Ruciński. We further improve the partite minimum codegree conditions to sum of all k par...

Several studies suggest that the N/OFQ (nociceptin/orphanin FQ)-NOP (N/OFQ peptide) receptor pathway is involved in airway physiology. We previously demonstrated a modulation of the endogenous N/OFQ levels in allergen-sensitized mice. Here, we investigated the effects of NOP receptor activation in allergen sensitization using a murine model of allergen-induced airway hyperresponsiveness (AHR). ...

BACKGROUND Exposure to ambient air particulate matter (PM) has been linked to decline in pulmonary function and cardiovascular events possibly through inflammation. Little is known about individual exposure to ultrafine particles (UFP) inside and outside modern homes and associated health-related effects. METHODS Associations between vascular and lung function, inflammation markers and exposu...