From the problems of arsenic in drinking water, to indoor air pollution from burning of biomass as fuel, to lead's effects in children, global environmental health problems are enormous and daunting. Some of these same or equally menacing hazards threaten the health of many in the United States, particularly and often disproportionately the poor; however, the scale of such threats here pales in...

The critical nonlinear Schrödinger equation (NLS) on bounded domains models the propagation of cw laser beams in hollow-core fibers. Unlike the NLS on unbounded domains which models propagation in bulk media, the ground-state waveguide solutions are stable and the condition of critical power for singularity formation is generically sharp. © 2001 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved. PACS: ...

In concrete environments, where uncertainty and dynamism are pervasive and time and resources are limited, reasoning and decision-making processes raise important problems related both to adaptive ability and to the computational complexity of the underlying cognitive mechanisms. In this paper we propose that a symbiotic integration between emotion and cognition is a key aspect to address these...

In an emerging competitive market such as healthcare, managers should focus on achieving excellent ratings to distinguish their organization from others. When it comes to customer loyalty, "excellent" has a different meaning. Customers who are merely satisfied often do not come back. The purpose of this study was to find out what influences adult patients to rate their overall experience as "ex...

New methods for analysing both platelet and plasma forms of the platelet-specific collagen receptor, glycoprotein VI (GPVI) in experimental models or human clinical samples, and the development of the first therapeutic compounds based on dimeric soluble GPVI-Fc or anti-GPVI antibody-based constructs, coincide with increased understanding of the potential pathophysiological role of GPVI ligand b...

We consider the large data scattering problem for 2D and 3D cubic-quintic nonlinear Schrödinger equation in focusing-focusing regime. Our attention is firstly restricted to space, where cubic nonlinearity L2-critical. establish a new type of criterion that uniquely determined by mass initial data, which differs from classical setting based on Lyapunov functional. At end, we formulate solely mas...

The accuracy of molecular signaling in biological cells and novel diagnostic devices is ultimately limited by the counting noise floor imposed by the thermal diffusion. Motivated by the fact that messenger RNA and vesicle-engulfed signaling molecules transiently bind to molecular motors and are actively transported in biological cells, we show here that the random active delivery of signaling p...

A suspension of gyrotactic microalgae Chlamydomonas augustae swimming in a cylindrical water vessel in solid-body rotation is studied. Our experiments show that swimming algae form an aggregate around the axis of rotation, whose intensity increases with the rotation speed. We explain this phenomenon by the centripetal orientation of the swimming direction towards the axis of rotation. This cent...

In this paper, an image binarization method based on a new discriminant criterion is proposed. The criterion emphasizes much the homogeneity of the object gray level distribution and while intentionally de-emphasizes the heterogeneity of the background such that the new binarizing or thresholding method can overcome some shortcomings of famous Otsu’s method. Experimental results on the three re...