Rebecca Johnson is an independent analyst on disarmament issues based in London and Geneva. She has published several reports on the NPT Review and Extension Conference and on negotiations at the Conference on Disarmament. She represented the ACRONYM Consortium at the NPT Conference as a nongovernmental representative. The relationship between comprehensive test ban treaty (CTBT) negotiations a...

Inorganic phosphate (Pi) plays a key role in diverse physiological functions. Several studies indicate that Pi may affect lung cell development through Na/Pi cotransporter (NPT). Several NPT subtypes have been identified in mammalian lung, and considerable progress has been made in our understanding of their function and regulation. Therefore, current study was performed to elucidate the potent...

U.S. nuclear export policy has undergone major transformations since 1945, and the most recent change, as expressed in the July 18, 2005, India-U.S. Joint Statement, represents an especially significant shift in policy. The document reverses more than a quarter century of U.S. declaratory policy, suggesting that the current U.S. administration regards nuclear proliferation to be both inevitable...

Global optimization of mixed integer nonlinear programming (MINLP) problems containing signomial terms is in many cases a difficult task, and many different approaches to solve these problems have been devised. In Westerlund (2005) a method where a relaxed convex relaxation of the original problem is obtained by approximating single-variable transformations with piecewise linear functions (PLFs...

Antigenic variation of type A foot and mouth disease (FMD) virus in Thailand was examined using a total of 82 field viruses isolated between 1986 and 1989. A two-dimensional serum microneutralisation test was used to compare these isolates to a reference strain, A15 Bangkok 1960 (A BKK/60). Viruses regarded as unrelated to A BKK/60 were compared to another reference strain, A22 Nakhon Pathom 19...

We present a modified bond-valence model of PbTiO3 based on the principles of bond-valence and bond-valence vector conservation. The relationship between the bond-valence model and the bond-order potential is derived analytically in the framework of a tight-binding model. An energy term, bond-valence vector energy, is introduced into the atomistic model and the potential parameters are reoptimi...

Rosyjska agresja na Ukrainę sprowokowała dyskusję o założeniach polityki bezpieczeństwa realizowanych przez Kijów w pierwszych latach niepodległości. Pojawiły się liczne głosy, nawet dość wpływowych osób, że największym błędem, jaki wówczas popełniono, była rezygnacja z odziedziczonego po ZSRS arsenału broni jądrowej i podpisanie NPT charakterze państwa nienuklearnego. Artykuł przypomina okolic...

BACKGROUND Near patient testing (NPT) and point-of-care testing (POCT) using portable benchtop analyzers has become necessary in many areas of the medical community, including biocontainment. METHODS We evaluated the Beckman AcT diff, Abaxis Vetscan HMII (two instruments), Abbott Cell-Dyn 1800, and Abaxis Vetscan VS2 for within-run precision and correlation to central laboratory instruments u...

The current approach to infertility of assisted reproductive technology (ART) completely misses and then bypasses the evaluation and treatment of cervical factor infertility. In contrast, the Creighton Model FertilityCare System (CrMS), a method of fertility awareness that has the unique ability to quantify cervical mucus observations, and natural procreative technology (NaProTECHNOLOGY or NPT)...