Demonstration of a pathogenic role for antineutrophil cytoplasmic antibodies (ANCA) underlies the scientific rationale for plasma exchange (PLEX) in the treatment of ANCA-associated vasculitis (AAV). Most clinical evidence of efficacy concerns the use of PLEX for the recovery of renal function in severe nephritis, when used in conjunction with immunosuppressive drug therapy. The development of ...

Many programs have been developed to help schools enhance students' health and reduce the prevalence of drug use, violence, and high-risk sexual behaviors. How should educators choose among these? This article describes selection criteria based on theory, research, and best educational practice that identify key social and emotional learning (SEL) competencies and program features. The SEL comp...

A clique model is one of the most important techniques on the cohesive subgraph detection; however, its applications are rather limited due to restrictive conditions of the model. Hence much research resorts to k-plex a graph in which any vertex is adjacent to all but at most k vertices which is a relaxation model of the clique. In this paper, we study the maximum k-plex problem and propose a f...

Given a sparse undirected graph G with weights on the edges, a k-plex partition of G is a partition of its set of nodes such that each component is a k-plex. A subset of nodes S is a k-plex if the degree of every node in the associated induced subgraph is at least |S|  k. The maximum edge-weight k-plex partitioning (Max-EkPP) problem is to find a k-plex partition with maximum total weight, whe...

Se-containing proteins play an important role in human metabolic processes such as antioxidant action. However, speciation analysis of Se-containing proteins in biological samples is challenging because of their small amounts. In order to determine selenoprotein P (Sel-P) in human plasma, separation performance was compared between size exclusion chromatography and affinity chromatography. It w...

For 25 years the NASA/GSFC Software Engineering Laboratory (SEL) has been a major resource in software process improvement activities. But due to a changing climate at NASA, agency reorganization, and budget cuts, the SEL has lost much of its impact. In this paper we describe the history of the SEL and give some lessons learned on what we did right, what we did wrong, and what others can learn ...

Hermaphrodites carrying dominant mutations in the gene egl-41 (egl, egg-laying defective) lack the hermaphrodite-specific HSN neurons but have the male-specific CEM neurons and therefore are weakly masculinized (1, 2). Our analyses with a deficiency (nDf42) and a duplication (ctDp8) that span the egl-41 locus indicate that egl-41 is not haplo-insufficient and that the dominant mutations cause a...

Selenium (Se) belongs to nutrients that are essential for human health. Biological activity of this compound, however, mainly depends on its dose, with a potential of Se to induce detrimental effects at high doses. Although mechanisms lying behind detrimental effects of Se are poorly understood yet, they involve DNA damage induction. Consequently, DNA damage response and repair pathways may pla...

In this paper is presented a new fault tolerant design methodology which provides protection against three most important radiation effects – single event transients (SET), single event upsets (SEU) and single event latchup (SEL). SETs and SEUs are mitigated using the hardware redundancy. Protection against SEL effects is provided by specially designed SEL power protection cell. Combination of ...