Fire danger rating systems are used to assess the potential for bushfire occurrence, fire spread and difficulty of fire suppression. Typically, fire danger rating systems combine meteorological information with estimates of the moisture content of the fuel to produce a fire danger index. Fire danger indices are used to declare fire bans and to schedule prescribed burns, among other applications...

Existing artificial immune optimization algorithms reflect a number of shortcomings, such as premature convergence and poor local search ability. This paper proposes a danger-theory-based immune network optimization algorithm, named dt-aiNet. The danger theory emphasizes that danger signals generated from changes of environments will guide different levels of immune responses, and the areas aro...

All aspects of the pathogenesis of atherosclerosis are critically influenced by the inflammatory response in vascular plaques. Research in the field of innate immunity from the past 2 decades has uncovered many novel mechanisms elucidating how immune cells sense microbes, tissue damage, and metabolic derangements. Here, we summarize which triggers of innate immunity appear during atherogenesis ...

In his recent and interesting contribution On Heidegger, medicine, and the modernity of modern medical technology Brassington brings together Heidegger s philosophy of technology on the one hand and medicine as being increasingly dependent on modern technology on the other (Brassington, 2006). Technology, for Heidegger, as Brassington points out, is associated with danger. Given the central rol...

The growing pressure on GPs to use chaperones when conducting intimate examinations (vaginal, rectal, breast, testicular) reveals an alarming deterioration in doctor–patient relationships. The peculiar intimacy of the relationship between doctor and patient renders the patient vulnerable to the doctor's abuse of power. Hence, making a sharp distinction between doctor and lover has been one of t...

While foreign pathogens and their products have long been known to activate the innate immune system, the recent recognition of a group of endogenous molecules that serve a similar function has provided a framework for understanding the overlap between the inflammatory responses activated by pathogens and injury. These endogenous molecules, termed alarmins, are normal cell constituents that can...

The quantification of spatial heterogeneity can be used to examine the structure of ecological systems. The 2008 Wenchuan earthquake caused severe vegetation damage. In addition to simply detecting change, the magnitude of changes must also be examined. Remote sensing and geographic information system techniques were used to produce landscape maps before and after the earthquake and analyze the...

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES The sudden occurrence of the 2008 Wenchuan Earthquake not only devastated people's health, but also may have impacted on the psychological and dietary attitudes and behaviours of the survivors. Although the influence of natural disaster on people's health has been extensively investigated, there is a lack of information about the effects on people's dietary attitudes a...

On March 11, 2011, the Pacific side of Japan's northeast was devastated by an earthquake and tsunami. For years, many researchers have been working on ways of examining the psychological effects of earthquakes on survivors in disaster areas who have experienced aftershocks, catastrophic fires, and other damage caused by the earthquake. The goal of this study is to examine scores on psychologica...