Since the beginning of the industrial era, the atmosphere content in greenhouse gases has rapidly increased. In its 4th assessment report (AR4), the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC, 2007) points out the impact of human’s activities and its responsibility for a large part of the changes recently observed in the Earth's climate: increase in global temperature, sea level rise, melt...

Plasma platelet-activating factor acetylhydrolase (PAF-AH) hydrolyzes PAF and oxidized phospholipids and is associated with lipoproteins in the circulation. Endotoxin [lipopolysaccharide (LPS)], a potent inducer of the acute phase response (APR), produces marked changes in several proteins that play important roles in lipoprotein metabolism. We now demonstrate that LPS produces a 2.5- to 3-fold...

Platelet activating factor (PAF) and PAF-like lipids induce inflammatory responses in target cells. These lipid mediators are inactivated by PAF-acetylhydrolase (PAF-AH). The PAF signaling system affects the growth of hematopoietic CD34(+) cells, but roles for PAF-AH in this process are unknown. Here, we investigated PAF-AH function during megakaryopoiesis and found that human CD34(+) cells acc...

Human plasma platelet-activating factor acetylhydrolase (PAF-AH) is a phospholipase A(2) that is primarily associated with low density lipoprotein (LDL). PAF-AH activity has also been found in high density lipoprotein (HDL), although it has recently been indicated that there is no PAF-AH protein in HDL. Plasma paraoxonase 1 (PON1) is an HDL-associated esterase, which also exhibits PAF-AH-like a...

We present the main results of a complete study concerning a small metallic statuette. A collaboration involving metallurgy, optics, computer graphics, archaeology and engineering specialists was needed. The virtual optical aspect computations obtained by spectral simulation is founded on optical measurements of metallic samples wether smooth or rough. The scientific study concerns a small stat...

The sudden explosion of the World Wide Web as a new publication medium has given a dramatic boost to the electronic publishing industry, which previously was a limited market centered around CD-ROMs and on-line databases. While the phenomenon has parallels to the advent of the tabloid press in the middle of last century, the electronic nature of the medium brings with it the typical characteris...

This paper tracks the fortunes of the debate on whether children playing at baptism can actually administer and receive a valid sacramental baptism from Rufinus of Aquileia (late 4th to early 5th century) through ca. 1300. Theologians and canonists who addressed this question arrived at no consensus. They often disagreed with their own masters, applied Rufinus to a range of issues he never took...