Existing searches for cosmic axions relics have relied heavily on the axion being non-relativistic and making up dark matter. However, light can be copiously produced in early Universe remain relativistic today, thereby constituting a Cosmic $\textit{axion}$ Background (C$a$B). As prototypical examples of sources, we consider thermal production, dark-matter decay, parametric resonance, topologi...

Microarray technology provides a powerful tool with which to study the coordinate expression of thousands of genes in a single hybridization reaction. However, probe specificity can have a direct influence on the accuracy of transcript quantitation. Therefore, it is essential to account for non-specific binding and cross-hybridization when analyzing data from microarray analysis. Agilent’s in s...

After four decades of war, Afghanistan’s higher education infrastructure was almost completely destroyed by 2001 [1]. During this period, many of the best faculty left the country in exile; others were killed or isolated from the academic world [2]. Many universities were closed and others functioned only at a basic level during the conflict years [2,3]. As a consequence, resulting facilities a...

The clinical and diagnostic aspects of cystic fibrosis have been extensively reviewed, with an emphasis on neonatal screening. This systematic literature review involved a search for relevant contributions in the PubMed and SciELO databases. The first references to cystic fibrosis date to the Middle Ages. Cystic fibrosis is the most frequent autosomal recessive hereditary disease among Caucasia...

In this paper, we introduce background cut, a high quality and realtime foreground layer extraction algorithm. From a single video sequence with a moving foreground object and stationary background, our algorithm combines background subtraction, color and contrast cues to extract a foreground layer accurately and efficiently. The key idea in background cut is background contrast attenuation, wh...