U.S. consumers spend more than $11 billion a year on cat and dog food, according to the Pet Food Institute. And pet food manufacturers compete for these dollars by trying to make their products stand out among the many types of dry, moist, and semi-moist foods available. Pet food packaging carries such descriptive words as "senior," "premium," "super-premium," "gourmet," and "natural." These te...

The concept of moist wound healing has been examined and gradually accepted by wound care clinicians during the last 40 years, and has led to the development of hundreds of dressings that support a moist wound environment. This article discusses the characteristics of an ideal dressing in an effort to assist clinicians in making appropriate dressing choices from common categories, including tra...

A diagnostic framework to investigate the role of processes around and during tropical cyclogenesis is presented. The key framework metric is the ratio of bulk differences of moist entropy over differences of angular momentum between an inner and outer region of a tropical disturbance or cyclone. This ratio is hypothesized to decrease and become negative as both the high-entropy core and low-le...

1 In 1997, we ran two Malaise insect traps in each of four stands of wet forest in Costa Rica (two old-growth and two 20-year-old stands) and four stands of moist forest in Panama (old-growth, 20, 40 and 120-year-old stands). 2 Wet forest traps caught 2.32 times as many ichneumonoids as moist forest traps. The average catch per old-growth trap was 1.89 times greater than the average catch per s...

We examine changes in the static stability of the midlatitude troposphere in simulations of global warming using 21 coupled climate models in the AR4 archive. The dry static stability within the midlatitudes exhibits a robust increase in the simulations, with upper tropospheric warming outpacing the lower troposphere by approximately 2 K. The increase in stability is especially evident in the s...

Since 1989 and until the summer of this year, all soil testing laboratories in Iowa and the USA dried soil samples at 35 to 40 oC (95 to 104 oF) and ground them before analysis for potassium (K), phosphorus (P), and other nutrients. Since early fall, however, a laboratory that began operations in Iowa is using testing procedures that involve no soil sample drying, and another laboratory operati...

The Intertropical Convergence Zone (ITCZ) narrows in response to global warming in both observations and climate models. However, a physical understanding of this narrowing is lacking. Here we show that the narrowing of the ITCZ in simulations of future climate is related to changes in the moist static energy (MSE) budget. MSE advection by the mean circulation and MSE divergence by transient ed...

The aim of the present study was to optimize the polyethylenimine (PEI)-mediated transfection method in order to simplify the efficient production of lentiviral vectors (LvVs), and to compare the CaPO4- and PEI-mediated transfection methods for producing LvVs. Different titration methods of LvV stocks, as well as different culture media, culture durations, cell densities and DNA quantities were...

Factors involved in wound healing and their interdependence are not yet fully understood; nevertheless, new prospects for therapy to favor speedy and optimal healing are emerging. Reports about wound healing modulation by local application of simple and natural agents abound even in the recent literature, however, most are anecdotal and lack solid scientific evidence. We describe the effect of ...

PURPOSE To assess the disinfection efficacy of multipurpose solutions (MPS) against different bacterial species adhered either to silicon hydrogel or to conventional hydrogel contact lenses (CLs). The influences of the MPS formulation and the chemical composition of the lens material were investigated. METHODS This investigation followed the standard 14729, which establishes the guidelines fo...