The forced oscillation technique (FOT) is a useful tool to assess respiratory resistance and reactance during tidal breathing in patients with respiratory diseases, specifically asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. Although the FOT has been clinically used, results of respiratory impedance can be affected by various factors such as upper airway artifact. We investigated the effects...

The Montreal Battery of Evaluation of Amusia (MBEA) is a battery of tests that assesses six music processing components: scale, contour, interval, rhythm, metric, and music memory. The present study sought to verify the psychometric characteristics of the MBEA in a sample of 150 adolescents aged 14-18 years in the city of Belo Horizonte, Minas Gerais, Brazil, and to develop specific norms for t...

We present K band adaptive optics observations of three high-redshift (z ∼ 2.2) high-luminosity quasars, all of which were studied for the first time. We also observed several point spread function (PSF) calibrators, non-simultaneously because of the small field of view. The significant temporal PSF variations on timescales of minutes inhibited a straightforward scaled PSF removal from the quas...

BACKGROUND Small airways dysfunction (SAD) contributes to the clinical expression of asthma. The identification of patients who suffer from SAD is important from a clinical perspective, as targeted therapy may improve patients' well-being and treatment efficacy. AIMS We aimed to realize the first step in the development of a simple small airways dysfunction tool (SADT) that may help to identi...

Homeowners in areas adjacent to wildlands – in the Wildland-Urban Interface (WUI) – can mitigate the risk that their home will be damaged in a wildfire by creating “defensible space” on their property. This article explores homeowners’ incentives to invest in defensible space using a unique data set on 35 WUI communities in Nevada. This is the first study to analyze homeowners’ incentives to in...

The coupling effect between tire and pavement is an intensively researched subject to analyse the dynamic interaction of the vehicle-pavement system. By considering the 11.00 R20 tire and expressway asphalt pavement, ABAQUS software was employed in this study to establish an improved model for simulating the coupling effect, in which the tire rubber was taken as a neoHookean material and the pa...

Sexual Bias and Household Consumption: A Semiparametric Analysis of Engel Curves in Rural China We analyze Engel curves for nuclear households in rural China. The sample includes more than 5000 nuclear families covering nineteen out of thirty Chinese provinces. We consider expenditures on food, also subdivided into several food subcategories such as cereals, or meat and fish, and other consumpt...

The distinguishing number of a graph G is the smallest positive integer r such that G has a labeling of its vertices with r labels for which there is no non-trivial automorphism of G preserving these labels. In early work, Michael Albertson and Karen Collins computed the distinguishing number for various finite graphs, and more recently Wilfried Imrich, Sandi Klavžar and Vladimir Trofimov compu...

The clinical relevance of the small airways in persistent asthma has been gaining greater recognition in recent years [1]. Studies have shown that a significant proportion of asthmatics on standard treatment fail to achieve satisfactory asthma control. For example, in one study of 3421 asthmatic subjects who underwent guideline-driven dose titration with standard inhaled corticosteroids (ICS)/l...

We report the high-resolution crystal structures of an extensively simplified variant of bovine pancreatic trypsin inhibitor containing 20 alanines (BPTI-20st) and a reference single-disulfide-bonded variant (BPTI-[5,55]st) at, respectively, 1.39 and 1.09 A resolutions. The sequence was simplified based on the results of an alanine scanning experiment, as reported previously. The effects of the...