Probiotics should bring ‘balance’ to the intestinal microbiota by stimulating beneficial bacteria, whilst mitigating adverse ones. Balance can also be interpreted as high alpha-diversity. Contrary, Escherichia coli is often regarded as an adverse component of the resident intestinal microbiota. The aim of the present study was to implement a mouse model for in vivo screening of Lactobacillus-strai

Since bicycles and bike-sharing systems are becoming increasingly important in modern transportation contexts, we suggest in this paper an alternative method to incorporate cycling among the freight transport alternatives within urban areas. We propose pursuing a sustainable initiative of crowdsourced delivery where some of the urban good deliveries may be voluntarily undertaken by users of the fr

Streptococcus pyogenes (Group A streptococcus; GAS) is a human pathogen causing diseases from uncomplicated tonsillitis to life-threatening invasive infections. GAS secretes EndoS, an endoglycosidase that specifically cleaves the conserved N-glycan on IgG antibodies. In vitro, removal of this glycan impairs IgG effector functions, but its relevance to GAS infection in vivo is unclear. Using target

The chapter primarily focuses on observing traffic conflicts (also known as near-accidents) as a site-based road safety analysis technique. Traffic conflicts are a type of surrogate safety measure. The term surrogate indicates that non-accident-based indicators are used to assess VRU safety instead ofthe more traditional approach focusing on accidents (see chapter 2). The theory underpinning surro

Allergic skin diseases caused by low molecular weight chemical compounds are a major health concern among the general population, especially in certain occupational groups. To limit exposure to such compounds, it is important that thorough risk assessments are performed before products reach the consumer market. Traditionally, such risk assessments have been based on animal tests, but due to sever

Background: Different test procedures are often used within performance-based measures, causing uncertainty as to whether results can be compared between studies. Thus, the aim of this study was to assess agreement between different test procedures for the single-leg hop for distance (SLHD) and the single-leg mini squat (SLMS), respectively, two commonly used tasks for assessing deficiency in lowe

In policy and research on sustainable consumption in general, and climate-oriented consumption specifically, key questions centre around whether people are motivated and prompted to support such consumption. A common claim in the scholarly debate is that policy makers, in face of fundamental governance challenges, refrain from taking responsibility and instead invest unrealistic hopes in that cons

Why do people and groups ignore, deny and resist knowledge about society's many problems? In a world of 'alternative facts', 'fake news' that some believe could be remedied by 'factfulness', the question has never been more pressing. After years of ideologically polarised debates on this topic, the book seeks to further advance our understanding of the phenomenon of knowledge resistance by integra

In order to characterize and control a system properly, it is inevitably necessary to understand and define the interactions between various design parameters and the controllability of the system. This study experimentally investigates effects of three design parameters, including supply water temperature, fan speed, and room heat load, on the dynamic response of a fan coil system. The experiment

TEKNOsim is a simple and user-friendly program for analyzing thermal indoor climate and performing annual hourly simulations. The program was originally developed to calculate heating and cooling demands, and indoor climate conditions of a single zone building for peak winter and summer design days. However, TEKNOsim version 6 has been revised to incorporate several new features including annual e

The incineration furnace at National Veterinary Institute (SVA) in Uppsala, Sweden, generates a large amount of waste heat. Some of this heat is partially recovered and is used for heating one of the main buildings during the furnace operation. However, around 2,000 MWh is wasted annually due to unavailability of any storage system. This work studies in detail four different solutions to utilize t

This paper investigates the effect of prospective secessions on economic integration and growth by examining the break-up of the Soviet Union in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Firstly, I show theoretically how regional elites had an incentive to restrict domestic trade once secession from the Union became possible. Secondly, I show empirically that the increased likelihood of secessions by the Un

This paper exploits large variation in separatist protests across the 183 provinces of the Soviet Union between 1987 and 1992 to measure the demand for autonomy and secession. This enables an investigation into the theoretical prediction that the incentive to separate should be influenced by the trade-off between the size of the potentially separating jurisdiction and preference heterogeneity. I f