Exploited ecosystems are characterised by exports of secondary production from each fished trophic level that reduce the energy available for upper levels at ecosystem scale thus impinging on overall secondary productions. Depletion in secondary production with respect to the unfished state is here proposed as a proxy for quantifying ecosystem effects of fishing. Theoretical analysis of trophic...

BACKGROUND Intuitively, cardiac dyssynchrony is the inevitable result of myocardial injury. We hypothesized that radial dyssynchrony reflects left ventricular remodeling, myocardial scarring, QRS duration and impaired LV function and that, accordingly, it is detectable in all patients with heart failure. METHODS 225 patients with heart failure, grouped according to QRS duration of <120 ms (A,...

[1] Variations in the total solar irradiance (TSI) associated with solar activity have been argued to influence the Earth’s climate system, in particular when solar activity deviates from the average for a substantial period. One such example is the 17th Century Maunder Minimum during which sunspot numbers were extremely low, as Earth experienced the Little Ice Age. Estimation of the TSI during...

The present paper is an attempt to test the applicability of the trophic state index (TRIX) for scaling the eutrophication along the Bulgarian Black Sea coastal zone in concert with a number of chemical and biological descriptors aimed at selection of relevant indicators of marine coastal area ecological quality. The following environmental parameters have been considered: t(o), salinity, nutri...

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE Brain biopsy remains an integral and necessary component in the diagnosis of brain lesions. We assessed the ability of turbo spectroscopic imaging (TSI) to provide a physiologically based target for tissue sampling. METHODS TSI was performed in 26 anesthetized patients immediately before MR-guided brain biopsy. In 10 patients, single-voxel spectroscopy was performed on ...