Background/Context: College grades can influence a student’s graduation prospects, academic motivation, postgraduate job choice, professional and graduate school selection, and access to loans and scholarships. Despite the importance of grades, national trends in grading practices have not been examined in over a decade, and there has been a limited effort to examine the historical evolution of...

Noise permeates biology on all levels, from the most basic molecular, sub-cellular processes to the dynamics of tissues, organs, organisms and populations. The functional roles of noise in biological processes can vary greatly. Along with standard, entropy-increasing effects of producing random mutations, diversifying phenotypes in isogenic populations, limiting information capacity of signalin...

Background/Context: Faced with rapidly changing demographics, districts are increasingly looking to partner with parents to support and improve student learning. Community organizing holds promise for pursuing educational equity through the development of low-income parent participation and leadership, but previous research has focused primarily on the use of structural social capital theory in...

Sri Lanka has made much progress in the elimination of leprosy. The Multi Drug Therapy (MDT) recommended by the World Health Organisation (WHO) 1 was introduced and expanded from 1982. A social marketing campaign, an awareness campaign to educate the general public about the early signs of leprosy and dispel misconceptions about the disease, was launched in 1990 2,3,4 . These have resulted in a...

During the past 50 years, growth and differentiation molecules have been identified and shown to contribute importantly to many different biological functions. One of these, the recently discovered neuregulin (NRG) and the associated erbB receptors were first found to be important for differentiation of the peripheral nervous system, where they direct the differentiation of Schwann cells from n...

Embryos of different species of vertebrate share a common organisation and often look similar. Adult differences among species become more apparent through divergence at later stages. Some authors have suggested that members of most or all vertebrate clades pass through a virtually identical, conserved stage. This idea was promoted by Haeckel, and has recently been revived in the context of cla...

25 Mycotoxins are toxigenic metabolites of fungi. They occur worldwide and are a potential risk to humans and animals when feeds and cereals are contaminated. Their importance and occurrence have been recognised for over 30 years. Following the eating of contaminated foods and feeds, so called mycotoxicoses are observed in animals. These intoxications should be differentiated from mycoses, whic...

W hen an innocent search for a local auto-body repair shop lands someone on a page that promotes great mortgage rates, inexpensive prescription drugs, legal assistance, or pain-free cosmetic surgery, that person has been Web spammed. This practice undermines the trustworthiness people have come to expect from search engines. Google, Yahoo, and MSN have built their reputation on providing reliab...

The main purpose of the present meta-analysis was to examine the criterion-related validity of the 20-m shuttle run test for estimating cardiorespiratory fitness. Relevant studies were searched from twelve electronic databases up to December 2014, as well as from several alternative modes of searching. The Hunter-Schmidt’s psychometric meta-analysis approach was conducted to estimate the popula...

Cholesterol is required for fetal development. Data obtained from recent studies in humans, rodents, and cell cultures showed that circulating maternal cholesterol can affect fetal metabolism and sterol accretion. Recent studies in our laboratory showed that the efflux of cholesterol from the basolateral side of the placental cells and the secretion of cholesterol from endodermal yolk sac cells...