Perlecan is a proteoglycan composed of a 470-kDa core protein linked to three heparan sulfate (HS) glycosaminoglycan chains. The intact proteoglycan inhibits the smooth muscle cell (SMC) response to vascular injury. Hspg2(Delta 3/Delta 3) (M Delta 3/Delta 3) mice produce a mutant perlecan lacking the HS side chains. The objective of this study was to determine differences between these two types o

Self-renewal of hematopoietic stem cells (HSCs) and leukemia-initiating cells (LICs) has been proposed to be influenced by low oxygen tension (hypoxia). This signaling, related to the cellular localization inside the bone marrow niche and/or influenced by extrinsic factors, promotes the stabilization of hypoxia inducible factors (HIFs). Whether HIF-1α can be used as a therapeutic target in the tre

Background There is debate about the value of assessing levels of C-reactive protein (CRP) and other biomarkers of inflammation for the prediction of first cardiovascular events. Methods We analyzed data from 52 prospective studies that included 246,669 participants without a history of cardiovascular disease to investigate the value of adding CRP or fibrinogen levels to conventional risk factors

The Geological Survey of Sweden (SGU) has been conducting airborne gamma spectrometry measurements of natural radioactivity in Sweden for more than 40 years. Today, the database covers about 80% of the country's land surface. This article explores the first step of putting this data into use in radioactive source search at ground level. However, in order to be able to use the airborne background m

We study the problem of clearing connections by agents placed at some vertices in a directed graph. The agents can move only along directed paths. The objective is to minimize the number of agents guaranteeing that any pair of vertices can be connected by a underlying undirected path that can be cleared by the agents. We provide several results on the hardness, approximability and parameterized co

The early identification of at-risk extremely preterm (EPT) children could improve long-term outcomes. This study sought to investigate sex differences in developmental outcomes and to identify sex-specific predictors at two-and-a-half-years-of-age.

Rose hips and sea buckthorn berries contain high amounts of beneficial bioactive compounds. In this study the content and stability of natural vitamins and antioxidants were investigated in two fruit beverages made from rose hip powder, sea buckthorn berry puree and white grape juice concentrate, and wheat germ oil in one of the beverages. Beverages were formulated, pasteurised and filled aseptica

To examine the association of sialic acid (SA) with first recorded diabetes mellitus-related hospitalization.

Over the past decade carbon capture and storage (CCS) has attracted increasing international attention as a climate change mitigation option and moved into the center of climate policy debates and negotiations. This special issue of Global Environmental Change brings together leading scholars to analyze the politics, policy and regulation of CCS in cross-country comparisons as well as in a global

Tanzanian Ambilikile Mwasapila aka Babu wa Loliondo, a retired Lutheran countryside pastor, suddenly became the most visible media personality and healer in East Africa for half a year in 2011. He had received dreams in which God provided him with the recipe for a herbal medicine that would heal all maladies. Lutheran bishops who had all but abandoned the elderly pastor in his former remote missio

The earliest stages of natural killer (NK) cell development are not well characterized. In this study, we investigated in different fetal hematopoietic tissues how NK cell progenitors and their mature NK cell progeny emerge and expand during fetal development. Here we demonstrate, for the first time, that the counterpart of adult bone marrow Lin(-)CD122(+)NK1.1(-)DX5(-) NK cell progenitor (NKP) em

III-V narrow band gap nanowires are considered for device applications. Nanowires are grown using the vapor-liquid-solid growth mechanism with the aim to implement high-performance devices. It is shown that high quality InAs, InSb, and GaSb nanowires, as well as their alloys, may be grown by metal organic vapor phase epitaxy. In particular, the formation of the InAs/GaSb (GaSb segment on InAs stem

The familial risk of medullary thyroid carcinoma (MTC alone or as part of multiple endocrine neoplasms, MEN2A/MEN2B) is high, so we aimed to answer open questions about the lifetime cumulative risk of thyroid cancer (LCRTC at 0-79 years) among relatives of MTC patients by age and sex. For this nationwide study, a cohort of 3217 first-/second-degree relatives (FDRs/SDRs) of 389 MTC patients diagnos

Friction is an important phenomenon in everyday life. All children are familiar with playground slides, which may thus be a good starting point for investigating friction. Motion on an inclined plane is a standard physics example. This paper presents an investigation of friction by a group of 11-year olds. How did they plan their investigations? What aspects of friction could they discern? What un

Many extensions of the Standard Model posit the existence of heavy particles with long lifetimes. This article presents the results of a search for events containing at least one long-lived particle that decays at a significant distance from its production point into two leptons or into five or more charged particles. This analysis uses a data sample of proton-proton collisions at root s = 8 TeV c

The impregnation of leafy vegetables with cryoprotectants using a combination of vacuum impregnation (VI) and pulsed electric fields (PEF) has been proposed by our research group as a method of improving their freezing tolerance and consequently their general quality after thawing. In this study, we have investigated the metabolic consequences of the combination of these unit operations on spinach

This paper introduces the development of scenario planning for sustainable tourism, from the 1970s to the present day. It outlines the links between scenario planning and forecasting, its role as a business-planning tool generally, and its use in tourism for destination planning and advocacy. The prominent role of models is shown and the evolution from the first generation of forecast-focused mode

An inclusive search for anomalous production of two prompt, isolated muons with the same electric charge is presented. The search is performed in a data sample corresponding to 1.6 fb(-1) of integrated luminosity collected in 2011 at root s = 7 TeV with the ATLAS detector at the LHC. Muon pairs are selected by requiring two isolated muons of the same electric charge with p(T) > 20 GeV and vertical