Brook trout (Sahelinus fontinalis Mitchill) with a chronically implanted dorsal aortic cannula were exposed to acidic environments. During exposure, trout developed severe metabolic acidosis as shown by decreases in standard plasma bicarbonate levels as well as negative base excess values. Reduced oxygen consumption seen in acidotic trout resulted from decreased gill oxygen transfer and reduced...

The corruption of speech due to presence of additive background noise causes severe difficulties in various communication environments. This paper presents a novel noise reduction technique based upon a combination of cascaded spectral subtraction and Wiener filter methods in wavelet domain. The scheme’s performance is illustrated by experiments in a noisy car environment, in comparison with sp...

Environments that are crowded with larvae of the fruit fly, Drosophila melanogaster, exhibit a temporal deterioration in quality as waste products accumulate and food is depleted. We show that natural selection in these environments can maintain a genetic polymorphism with one group of genotypes specializing on the early part of the environment and a second group specializing on the late part. ...

SUMMARY The applications of GPS can be found across almost all of a nation's economic, scientific and social activities. The major shortcoming of GNSS is that it is usable everywhere where there is clear sky, and hence fails to operate where it's impossible or difficult to receive the satellite signals. In some difficult signal environments – principally where the satellite signals are weak (<-...

Despite the popularity and maturity of RTK GPS (GNSS), acceptable performance is heavily dependent on a relatively unobstructed sky-view, where there are at least five satellites with good geometry available, and on the reliability of the wireless data link used for differential corrections. In so-called “difficult” environments where satellite obstruction is common, such as open-pit mining and...

Security is an important issue in Smart Home Environments. Most especially in situations where smart homes can store and release sensitive data to third parties, which makes data collected within smart environments vulnerable to severe security and privacy abuses. Therefore, identification of these security issues is crucial to taking the appropriate steps towards mitigating them and enhancing ...

This paper addresses the problem of noise robustness of automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems in various noisy environments using a Minimum Mean-Square Error Short-Time Spectral Amplitude Estimator (MMSE-STSA). This was accomplished by the integration of a Perceptual Weighting Filter (PWF) with the MMSESTSA algorithm in order to improve the preprocessing speech enhancement performance. The...

In certain communication environments, digital speech transmission systems must work in severe acoustic environments where the noise levels exceeds 110 dB. In other environments, speakers must use an oxygen face mask. In both situations, the intelligibility of encoded speech falls below an acceptable level. We have developed a technique for improving speech quality in these situations. Previous...

The structures and properties of membrane proteins in lipid bilayers are expected to closely resemble those in native cell-membrane environments, although they have been difficult to elucidate. By performing solid-state NMR measurements at very fast (100 kHz) magic-angle spinning rates and at high (23.5 T) magnetic field, severe sensitivity and resolution challenges are overcome, enabling the a...

background: work is the key component for most people in regard to financial, social and wellbeing matters. employment is an important factor underpinning mental health disorders. however, unemployment remains an unsolved issue worldwide. numerous studies have focused on employment outcomes in people with severe mental illness (smi) but, only a few have explored their perspective on employment....