Following the advent of molecular assays that measure T cell receptor excision circles (TRECs) present in recent thymic emigrants, it has been conclusively shown that thymopoiesis persists in most adults, but that functional output decreases with age, influencing the maintenance of a diverse and functional T cell receptor (TCR) repertoire. Space flight has been shown to result in a variety of p...

This paper investigates the interaction between cultural evolution and biological evolution in the emergence of phonemic coding in speech. It is observed that our nearest relatives, the primates, use holistic utterances, whereas humans use phonemic utterances. It can therefore be argued that our last common ancestor used holistic utterances and that these must have evolved into phonemic utteran...

We investigate the problem of inferring contiguous ancestral regions (CARs) of the genome of the last common ancestor of all extant amniotes, based on the currently sequenced and assembled amniote genomes as ingroups and three teleost fish genomes as outgroups. We combine a methodological framework using conserved syntenies computed from whole genome alignments of amniote species together with ...

In contrast to adults, the murine neonatal CD4+ compartment contains a high frequency of recent thymic emigrants (RTEs). However, the functional capabilities of these cells in neonates are relatively unknown. Moreover, it has not been determined whether RTEs from neonates and adults are comparable. Here we have directly compared neonatal and adult CD4+ RTEs for the first time, using a transgeni...

The detection of superinfection involves an assessment whether the sequences obtained from a patient diverged from a last common ancestor within that patient, or several lineages were introduced by independent infection events. First we tested whether sequence divergence can be used to identify viral sequences of polyphyletic origin. In principle, a conservative divergence threshold could be es...

This study assessed physiological and cardiac factors associated with 10-km running performance in a group of highly trained endurance runners age 21–63 years. Participants (N = 37) underwent a resting echocardiograph and incremental treadmill running test. They also provided information on their recent 10-km races. Data were analyzed using “best subsets” multiple regression. Declines with age ...

Two popular mounting positions of Doppler radar for human fall detection are in the ceiling center and at the torso level. This paper examines the fall signatures observed by a Doppler radar at the two positions and evaluates their consistencies with respect to the fall directions and locations. The complementary characteristics of the fall signatures motivate the integration of the features fr...

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This is a comprehensive review of the recent progresses made in the field of zeolite membranes. It describes zeolitic materials and methods of membrane fabrication, followed by a summary of applications for gas separation, pervaporation and separation of liquid mixtures. Special attention is called to polymer mixed matrix membranes (MMMs) and membranes based on metal organic frame works (MOFs)....