This paper demonstrates a content based retrieval strategy that can tell whether there are naked people present in an image No manual intervention is required The approach combines color and tex ture properties to obtain an e ective mask for skin regions The skin mask is shown to be e ective for a wide range of shades and colors of skin These skin regions are then fed to a specialized grouper w...

We investigated the feasibility of transferring naked plasmid DNA containing a therapeutic gene (IL-12) into mice harboring growing Renca tumors. We found that naked DNA transferred into growing Renca and B16(F10) tumors gives higher expression level of reporter gene than complexes of DNA with DDAB/DOPE or DC-Chol/DOPE. Transfer of naked DNA carrying the IL-12 gene into growing Renca tumors cau...

We study the occurrence and nature of naked singularities for a dust model with non-zero cosmological constant in (n + 2)-dimensional Szekeres space-times (which possess no Killing vectors) for n ≥ 2. We find that central shell-focusing singularities may be locally naked in higher dimensions but depend sensitively on the choice of initial data. In fact, the nature of the initial density determi...

We give a characterization of the central shell-focusing curvature singularity that can form in the spherical gravitational collapse of a bounded matter distribution obeying the dominant energy condition. This characterization is based on the limiting behaviour of the mass function in the neighbourhood of the singularity. Depending on the rate of growth of the mass as a function of the area rad...

In contrast to other cereals, typical barley cultivars have caryopses with adhering hulls at maturity, known as covered (hulled) barley. However, a few barley cultivars are a free-threshing variant called naked (hulless) barley. The covered/naked caryopsis is controlled by a single locus (nud) on chromosome arm 7HL. On the basis of positional cloning, we concluded that an ethylene response fact...

Identifying the genetic mechanisms underlying phenotypic change is essential to understanding how gene regulatory networks and ultimately the genotype-to-phenotype map evolve. It is recognized that microRNAs (miRNAs) have the potential to facilitate evolutionary change [1-3]; however, there are no known examples of natural morphological variation caused by evolutionary changes in miRNA expressi...

Carcass measurements and some immunocompetence parameters were investigated in naked neck (NaNa & Nana) and normally feathered (nana) genotypes under summer season conditions of Egypt. Two hundred and ten broiler chicks (70 of each genotype) were reared under similar environmental, managerial and hygienic conditions. The feed and water were provided ad libitum. The average high and low ambient ...

Extreme longevity requires the continuous and large-scale adaptation of organ systems to delay senescence. Naked mole rats are the longest-living rodents, whose nervous system likely undergoes life-long adaptive reorganization. Nevertheless, neither the cellular organization of their cerebral cortex nor indices of structural neuronal plasticity along extreme time-scales have been established. W...

The Wnt-signaling cascade is required for several crucial steps during early embryogenesis, and its activity is modulated by various agonists and antagonists to provide spatiotemporal-specific signaling. Naked cuticle is a Wnt antagonist that itself is induced by Wnt signaling to keep Wnt signaling in check. Little is known about the regulation of this antagonist. We have recently shown that th...