Biological responses often obey Weber's law, according to which the magnitude of the response depends only on the fold change in the external input. In this study, we demonstrate that a system involving a simple autocatalytic reaction shows such a response when a chemical is slowly synthesized by the reaction from a faster influx process. We also show that an autocatalytic reaction process occu...

The well-known third list homomorphism theorem states that if a function h is both an instance of foldr and foldl , it is a list homomorphism. Plenty of previous works devoted to constructing list homomorphisms, however, overlook the fact that proving h is both a foldr and a foldl is often the hardest part which, once done, already provides a useful hint about what the resulting list homomorphi...

The CCAAT box is one of the most common cis-elements present in eukaryotic promoters and is bound by the transcription factor NUCLEAR FACTOR Y (NF-Y). NF-Y is composed of three subunits, NF-YA, NF-YB, and NF-YC. Unlike animals and fungi, plants have significantly expanded the number of genes encoding NF-Y subunits. We provide a comprehensive classification of NF-Y genes, with a separation of cl...

OBJECTIVES The aim was to study whether a workplace-registered frequent short-term sick leave spell pattern was an early indicator of future disability pension or future long-term sick leave among municipal eldercare workers. SETTING The municipal healthcare sector in the city of Aarhus, which is the second largest city in Denmark. PARTICIPANTS All elder care employees who worked the entire...

D uring the past decade, there has been a burgeoning interest in the role of religiosity in family functioning and child and adolescent adjustment (e.g., bridges & moore, 2002; mahoney, Pargament, swank, & Tarakeshwar, 2001) and as a resource for adults coping with stress (Pargament, 1997, 2007). The focus of this chapter is on the role of religiosity across the life span in predicting adulthoo...

We calculate improved lower bounds for the connective constants for selfavoiding walks on the square, hexagonal, triangular, (4.8), and (3.12) lattices. The bound is found by Kesten’s method of irreducible bridges. This involves using transfermatrix techniques to exactly enumerate the number of bridges of a given span to very many steps. Upper bounds are obtained from recent exact enumeration d...

Reliable prediction of traffic loads is essential for bridge planning and design. In the study, an improved unbiased Grey Markov forecasting model is applied to predict traffic loads on highway bridges. The comparison between the predicted results and existing practical measurements indicates that high accuracy can be achieved by using the developed model for bridge load prediction. The develop...

BACKGROUND Variance in microarray studies has been widely discussed as a critical topic on the identification of differentially expressed genes; however, few studies have addressed the influence of estimating variance. METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS To break intra- and inter-individual variance in clinical studies down to three levels--technical, anatomic, and individual--we designed experime...