MEETING OBJECTIVES Staff requests that the Board respond to the following questions: a. Should a public hearing be scheduled? b. If not, are there individual respondents from whom you wish to seek clarification directly? (Note that staff expects to work closely with respondents who proposed alternatives to ensure that technical provisions are clear.) Following the meeting, staff will continue a...

A massless scalar field minimally coupled to gravity and propagating in the Schwarzschild spacetime is considered. After dimensional reduction under spherical symmetry the resulting 2D field theory is canonically quantized and the renormalized expectation values 〈Tab〉 of the relevant energy-momentum tensor operator are investigated. Asymptotic behaviours and analytical approximations are given ...

Nowadays rule-based systems are very common. The use of ontology-based systems is becoming ever more popular, especially in addition to the rule-based one. The most widely used ontology development platform is Protégé. Protégé provides a knowledge acquisition tool, but still the main issue of the ontologybased rule system is rule acquisition. This paper presents an approach to using SWRL rules ...

The FOK is an inbred rat strain with a genotypic adaptation to hot environments. The present study compared the thermoeffector thresholds and preferred ambient temperatures (Tpref) of the FOK rat with those of other rat strains. Male FOK, WKAH, and Donryu rats were used. First, they were loosely restrained and placed individually in a metabolic chamber with an ambient temperature of 26.0°C. The...

AIMS To investigate the occurrence and distribution of thermo-acidophilic bacteria (TAB) associated with various commercial fruit crop soils in Japan and to assess their ability to produce the odorous phenolic compound, guaiacol. METHODS AND RESULTS Phylogenetic analysis based on the 5' end of the 16S rRNA gene (approximately 500 bp), was performed on 62 TAB isolated from the soil of several ...

We present the results for hadronic spectrum, decay constants and the light quark masses obtained with non-perturbatively improved Wilson fermions. We also give our preliminary results for the heavy-light decay constants. The method for systematic improvement of the Wilson action and bilinear quark operators, recently proposed by Alpha–collaboration [1], provides a full cancellation of the line...

BACKGROUND The urgent need for cheap and easy-to-use protection against both unwanted pregnancies and sexually transmitted diseases has stimulated considerable interest in the use of surfactants as microbicides, anti-viral, and contraceptive agents in recent years. In the present study we report a systematic in vitro evaluation of the microbicidal, anti-viral and contraceptive potential of cati...

Saliva is a body fluid containing antibodies of diagnostic significance. Unlike venipuncture, saliva collection (by brushing the teeth and rubbing the gums) is painless, non-invasive, inexpensive, simple and rapid. By using sensitive immunoassays in salivary specimens it is possible to diagnose immunoglobulins against a wide range of infectious diseases e.g. hepatitis A, B and C, measles, mumps...