AIM To benchmark severity of complications using the Accordion Severity Grading System (ASGS) in patients undergoing operation for severe pancreatic injuries. METHODS A prospective institutional database of 461 patients with pancreatic injuries treated from 1990 to 2015 was reviewed. One hundred and thirty patients with AAST grade 3, 4 or 5 pancreatic injuries underwent resection (pancreatodu...

Fe3O4 nanoparticles were prepared by a simple solid-state method under ambient conditions. The obtained nanoparticles, with small size and large surface area, were used as a catalyst for direct coal liquefaction (DCL). The results display that high conversion and oil yield were achieved with the nanocatalysts in direct liquefaction of two kinds of coals, i.e., Heishan coal and Dahuangshan coal....

Defective interfering (DI) RNAs, helper virus-dependent deletion mutant RNAs derived from the parental viral genomic RNA during replication, have been described for most RNA virus taxonomic groups. We now report that DI RNA production in the chestnut blight fungus, Cryphonectria parasitica, persistently infected by virulence-attenuating positive sense RNA hypoviruses, depends on one of two host...

Protein-protein interactions stabilized by multiple separate hot spots are highly challenging targets for synthetic scaffolds. Surface-mimetic foldamers bearing multiple recognition segments are promising candidate inhibitors. In this work, a modular bottom-up approach is implemented by identifying short foldameric recognition segments that interact with the independent hot spots, and connectin...

Conformal field theory (CFT) is important in modern particle physics in various contexts. The most powerful tool in the 2-dimensional CFT is the operator product expansion (OPE). The OPE between the energy-momentum tensor and an operator extracts its conformal weight. We find it interesting to consider the similar issue with respect to the Wilson loop in a conformally invariant Yang-Mills theor...

The properties of double-stranded DNA and other chiral molecules depend on the local geometry, i.e., on curvature and torsion, yet the paths of closed chain molecules are globally restricted by topology. When both of these characteristics are to be incorporated in the description of circular chain molecules, e.g., plasmids, it is shown to have implications for the total positive curvature integ...

Leishmaniasis affects 1.5-2 million new cases in the world annually. Two major complications of cutaneous leishamaniasis include diffuse cutaneous leishamaniasis (DCL ) occurring in the setting of deficient cell mediated immunity, typically with HIV infection, and chronic cutaneous leishamaniasis (CCL ) developing in approximately 4% of L. tropica infections in Iran and Afghanistan which also m...