Bioavailable water concentrations of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAH), polychlorinated biphenyls (PCB) and organochlorine pesticides (OCP) were measured in the water column from Three Gorges Reservoir (TGR) collected in May 2008 using semipermeable membrane devices (SPMDs). The sampling sites spanned the whole reservoir from the upstream Chongqing to the great dam covering more than 600 k...

The driving force and nucleation rate of calcium phosphate (Ca-P) precipitation in simulated body fluid (SBF) were analyzed based on the classical crystallization theory. SBF supersaturation with respect to hydroxyapatite (HA), octacalcium phosphate (OCP) and dicalcium phosphate (DCPD) was carefully calculated, considering all the association/dissociation reactions of related ion groups in SBF....

A method is proposed to systematically transform a constrained optimal control problem (OCP) into an unconstrained OCP, which can be treated in the standard calculus of variations. The considered class of constraints comprises up to m input constraints and m state constraints with well-defined relative degree, where m denotes the number of inputs of the given nonlinear system. Starting from an ...

Background Depot medroxyprogesterone acetate (DMPA) contraceptive use is associated with an increased risk for Chlamydia infection. However, prior studies inadequately account for potential differences in sexual behavior between users of DMPA and users of other contraceptive methods. In this study we compare sexual risk-taking behavior in women using DMPA to women using oral contraceptive pills...

Background: This retrospective study evaluated the effect of profound pituitary suppression with oral contraceptive pill (OCP) pretreatment in gonadotropin-releasing hormone (GnRH) antagonist cycles stimulated with recombinant follicle stimulating hormone plus highly purified human menopausal gonadotropin. Methods: The analysis included women aged 20-46 years (N=318) who utilized OCP pretreatme...

During the initial phase of space trajectory planning and optimization, it is common to have to solve large dimensional global optimization problems. In particular continuous low-thrust propulsion is computationally very intensive to obtain optimal solutions. In this work, we investigate the application of machine learning regressors to estimate the final spacecraft mass mf after an optimal low...

Fluorescence microscopy is commonly used to investigate disease progression in biological tissues. Biological tissues, however, are strongly scattering in the visible wavelengths, limiting the application of fluorescence microscopy to superficial (<200µm) regions. Optical clearing, which involves incubation of the tissue in a chemical bath, reduces the optical scattering in tissue, resulting in...

The concluding chapter of this part of the book discusses several flight control implementation examples that integrate Matlab/Simulink within the open control platform (OCP) framework (described in Chapters 4 and 5). A public domain version of an F-16 aircraft model, available as a Simulink block with OCP distribution 1.0, is used for illustration. The first example is a linear quadratic regul...

OBJECTIVE To investigate the microbial and cytopathological changes and genital symptoms in oral contraceptive pill (OCP) and intrauterine contraceptive device (IUCD) users. METHODS Included in the study were 34 women using OCP and 34 women using IUCD for 24 to 36 months period and 34 women as control group. We conducted the study between March to September 2005 in Antakya Maternity Hospital,...