OBJECTIVE Carbon dioxide (CO2) pneumoperitoneum has been implicated as a possible factor in early immune preservation in laparoscopic surgery. Although the current analysis was not adequate to clarify this issue, the aim of this study was to compare CO2 insufflation laparoscopic cholecystectomy to gasless abdominal wall lift laparoscopic cholecystectomy with respect to preservation of the immun...

Patients with thick skin mainly exhibit the aging processes of sagging, whereas patients with thin skin develop wrinkles or volume loss. Asian skin is usually thicker than that of Westerners; and thus, the sagging of skin due to aging, rather than wrinkling, is the chief problem to be addressed in Asians. Asian skin is also relatively large in area and thick, implying that the weight of tissue ...

Using a unique data set with 168 ski resorts located in France, this paper investigates the relationship between lift ticket prices and supply-related characteristics of ski resorts. A nonparametric analysis combined with a principal component analysis is used to identify the set of efficient ski resorts, defined as those where the lift ticket price is the cheapest for a given level of quality....

Flow in a gas-lift digester with a central draft-tube was investigated using computational fluid dynamics (CFD) and different turbulence closure models. The k-ω Shear-Stress-Transport (SST), Renormalization-Group (RNG) k-∊, Linear Reynolds-Stress-Model (RSM) and Transition-SST models were tested for a gas-lift loop reactor under Newtonian flow conditions validated against published experimental...

The PHOENICS code is employed to perform numerical simulations of gas-liquid two-phase bubbly flows in large vertical flow channels. Air-water and steam-water flows in large diameter pipes are simulated using the built-in two-fluid option of the code where liquid and gas are modeled as two interacting continua. The code is utilized in conjunction with advanced twophase flow models, accounting f...

J. Am. Soc. Brew. Chem. 66(4):233-238, 2008 The influence of oxygen supply on the formation and conversion of the most important flavor compounds during continuous, alcohol-free beer production was studied in a complex model medium. The medium contained inorganic salts, nutrients, and aldehydes (hexanal, 2-methyl propanal, 3-methyl butanal, and furfural) and mimicked real brewery wort, with the...

We introduce and study a new containment relation in graphs – lift contractions. H is a lift contraction of G if H can be obtained from G by a sequence of edge lifts and edge contractions. We show that a graph contains every n-vertex graph as a lift contraction, if (1) its treewidth is large enough, or (2) its pathwidth is large enough and it is 2-connected, or (3) its order is large enough and...