Abstract Background There is a need for new approaches in agriculture to improve safety of final products as well increase environmental acceptability. In this paper, the biodynamic preparation 501 (horn silica) was sprayed on Vitis vinifera (L.) cv Garganega plants two vineyards located Veneto region, North-East Italy. Leaf samples were collected day 501-treatment and 11 days later, berries sa...

We present X-ray observations of the nearby TeV blazar Mrk 501 obtained with RXTE during 1997, 1998, 1999, 2000, and 2004. The goal of this study is twofold: 1) characterize the long-term X-ray flux and spectral variability of the source with a model-independent analysis, and 2) investigate the X-ray and TeV correlation on long timescales (> days). Significant spectral variations were observed ...

The report issued by the Inquiry Board in charge of inspecting the Ariane 5 flight 50.1 failure concludes that causes of the failure are rooted into poor S/W Engineering practice. From the failure scenario described in the Inquiry Board report, it is possible to infer what, in our view, are the real causes of the 501 failure. We develop arguments to demonstrate that the real causes of the 501 f...

The prevalence and incidence of cytomegalovirus (CMV) infections were studied in a group of homosexual men. Of the 710 participants, 501 (70.6%) had complement fixing antibodies to CMV on entry to the study. During the follow up (maximum 23 months) 69 CMV infections were found: 50 primary infections among the 209 seronegative men (attack rate 27.3%), and 19 recurrent infections among the 501 se...

Hepatitis C Virus (HCV) encodes two envelope glycoproteins, E1 and E2. Our previous work selected a specific aptamer ZE2, which could bind to E2 with high affinity, with a great potential for developing new molecular probes as an early diagnostic reagents or therapeutic drugs targeting HCV. In this study, the binding sites between E2 and aptamer ZE2 were further explored. E2 was truncated to 15...

We consider the shock structures that can arise in blazar jets as a consequence of variations in the jet flow velocity. There are two possible cases: (1) A double shock system consisting of both a forward and reverse shock (2) A single shock (either forward or reverse) together with a rarefaction wave. These possibilities depend upon the relative velocity of the two different sections of jet. U...

Carbon nanotubes and metal oxide semiconductors have emerged as important materials for p-type and n-type thin-film transistors, respectively; however, realizing sophisticated macroelectronics operating in complementary mode has been challenging due to the difficulty in making n-type carbon nanotube transistors and p-type metal oxide transistors. Here we report a hybrid integration of p-type ca...