background: mercury (hg) is a hazardous metal responsible for environmental contamination and human intoxication. methyl mercury bio-accumulation through food chain can be responsible for chronic mercury exposure of south caspian sea communities with a diet rich in fish. uncertainties about exposure levels that could have damaging consequences for nervous system development of infants makes bio...

  Cartilage hair hypoplasia (CHH), is a rare cause of metaphyseal chondrodysplasia and short stature. Other features included hair abnormality, immunodeficiency, anemia, gastrointestinal disorders (Hirschsprung disease, celiac, …) and increased risk of cancer. The disease is an autosomal recessive disorder and previously has not been reported in Iran. We report a 9-year-old boy diagnosed as car...

Despite extensive efforts, a definitive picture of the glass transition of ultra-thin polymer films has yet to emerge. The effect of film thickness h on the glass transition temperature T(g) has been widely examined, but this characterization does not account for the fragility of glass-formation, which quantifies how rapidly relaxation times vary with temperature T. Accordingly, we simulate sup...

The concept of 'fragility' constitutes a central point of the glass transition science serving as the 'universal' metric linking previtreous dynamics of qualitatively distinct systems. Finding the fundamental meaning of fragility is the 'condicio sine qua' for reaching the long expected conceptual breakthrough in this domain. This report shows that fragility is determined by the ratio between t...

Lenders condition future loans on some index of past performance. Typically, banks condition future loans on repayments of earlier obligations while international organizations condition future loans on the implementation of some policy conditions. We build an agency model that accounts for these tendencies to offer an explanation for why both types of conditionality clause may coexist. The opt...

This paper represents the first effort in seismic fragility analysis of a structure using a structural analysis model developed on the basis of measured vibration data. An instrumented highway bridge is used to demonstrate the analysis procedure involving measuring ambient vibration, identifying modal parameters from the measured data, updating a preliminary FE model (obtained from structural d...

fragility curves represent the probabilities that structural damages, under various levels of seismic excitation, will exceed the specified damage states by means of earthquake intensity damage relations. conceptual aspects related to seismic vulnerability, damage and risk evaluation are discussed first, together with a short review of the most widely used possibilities for the seismic evaluati...