Mucins and their glycosylation have been suggested to play an important role in colorectal carcinogenesis. We examined potentially functional genetic variants in the mucin genes or genes involved in their glycosylation with respect to colorectal cancer (CRC) risk and clinical outcome. We genotyped 23 single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) covering 123 SNPs through pairwise linkage disequilibrium (

The hMRI toolbox is an open-source toolbox for the calculation of quantitative MRI parameter maps from a series of weighted imaging data, and optionally additional calibration data. The multi-parameter mapping (MPM) protocol, incorporating calibration data to correct for spatial variation in the scanner’s transmit and receive fields, is the most complete protocol that can be handled by the toolbox

Cross-sections of associated production of a Higgs boson decaying into bottomquark pairs and an electroweak gauge boson, W or Z, decaying into leptons are measured as a function of the gauge boson transverse momentum. The measurements are performed in kinematic fiducial volumes defined in the ‘simplified template cross-section’ framework. The results are obtained using 79.8 fb−1 of proton-proton c

Ethics, Science and Society: Challenges for BioPolitics is an international project of academic research, scientific dissemination, and social and political responsibility, sponsored by the Luso-American Development Foundation. Its main objective is to stress the importance of this triptych-style approach – ethics, science, society – to address some of the current and major challenges facing human

As autonomous robots expand their application beyond research labs and production lines, they must work in more flexible and less well defined environments. To escape the requirement for exhaustive instruction and stipulated preference ordering, a robot’s operation must involve choices between alternative actions, guided by goals. We describe a robot that learns these goals from humans by consider

We approach the semantics of prepositions from the perspective of conceptual spaces. Focusing on purely spatial locative and directional prepositions, we analyze both types of prepositions in terms of polar coordinates instead of Cartesian coordinates. This makes it possible to demonstrate that the property of convexity holds quite generally in the domain of prepositions of location and direction,

While “meaning negotiation” has become an ubiquitous term, its use is often confusing. A negotiation problem implies not only a convenience to agree, but also diverging interest on what to agree upon. It implies agreement but also the possibility of (voluntary) disagreement. In this chapter, we look at meaning negotiation as the process through which agents starting from different preferred concep

Pointing is a typical means of directing a human's attention to a specific object or event. Robot pointing behaviours that direct the attention of humans are critical for human-robot interaction, communication and collaboration. In this paper, we describe an experiment undertaken to investigate human comprehension of a humanoid robot's pointing behaviour. We programmed a NAO robot to point to mark

Classical conditioning is important in humans to learn and predict events in terms of associations between stimuli and to produce responses based on these associations. Social robots that have a classical conditioning skill like humans will have an advantage to interact with people more naturally, socially and effectively. In this paper, we present a novel classical conditioning mechanism and desc

Background:Nurses and physicians in nephrology settings provide care for patients with end-stage kidney disease receiving hemodialysis treatment along a complex illness trajectory.Aim:The aim was to explore physicians’ and nurses’ perspectives on the trajectories toward the end of life involving decisions regarding hemodialysis withdrawal for patients with end-stage kidney disease.Research design