BACKGROUND Central blood pressure (CBP) is superior to brachial blood pressure as a predictor of cardiovascular risk in patients with hypertension. There is currently no consensus regarding whether a direct renin inhibitor (DRI) selectively acts on CBP. METHODS Thirty subjects with essential hypertension who showed a CBP of 140 mm Hg or higher after 12 weeks of treatment with a standard dose ...

The diversity of life is one of the most striking aspects of our planet; hence knowing how many species inhabit Earth is among the most fundamental questions in science. Yet the answer to this question remains enigmatic because the limited sampling of the world’s biodiversity has precluded direct quantification, and because indirect estimations rely on assumptions that have proven highly contro...

The Galliformes are one of the most threatened of avian orders; more than 25% of their species are considered at risk of extinction compared with 11% of all birds. Direct exploitation is believed to be the main reason for this substantially higher level of endangerment. Using additional and recently collected locality data from east Asian protected areas, analysis here revises an earlier study ...

This paper discusses one important component of the analysis of the decline of the profit rate in the recent decades in Robert Brenner’s Economics of Global Turbulence. Our single focus in this paper is Brenner’s implicit theory of distribution. It must be emphasized from the outset that the present discussion does not question the central role given by Brenner to the profit rate in his investi...

With the rise of modern interconnects offering direct remote memory access (RDMA), one sided programming becomes increasingly popular. The MPI-3.0 one sided chapter specifies a programming interface that leverages these features directly. foMPI (fast one-sided MPI, [3]) was introduced as a reference implementation to provide highest performance and minimal overheads. Many applications have to c...

The assessment of therapeutic compliance is commonly done by either indirect method or direct method. In indirect method, the assessments are done by indirect measurement of parameters such as discussion with patients and pill counts at intervals during the treatment which don’t measure the drug concentration in a matrix such as blood or urine. In direct method, the assessments which rely upon ...

We investigated the role of reference electrode placement (ipsilateral v contralateral frontal pole) on conjunction visual search task performance when the transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) cathode is placed over right posterior parietal cortex (rPPC) and over right frontal eye fields (rFEF), both of which have been shown to be causally involved in the processing of this task using...

We show that the dearth of brown dwarfs in short-period orbits around Solar-mass stars – the brown dwarf desert – can be understood as a consequence of inward migration within an evolving protoplanetary disc. Brown dwarf secondaries forming at the same time as the primary star have masses which are comparable to the initial mass of the protoplanetary disc. Subsequent disc evolution leads to inw...