Resource managers are concerned that offshore oil platforms in the Southern California Bight may be contributing to environmental contaminants accumulated by marine fishes. To examine this possibility, 18 kelp bass (Paralabrax clathratus), 80 kelp rockfish (Sebastes atrovirens), and 98 Pacific sanddab (Citharichthys sordidus) were collected from five offshore oil platforms and 10 natural areas ...

In this review the recent progress in molecular platforms that form rigid and well-defined contact to a metal surface are discussed. Most of the presented examples have at least three anchoring units in order to control the spatial arrangement of the protruding molecular subunit. Another interesting feature is the lateral orientation of these foot structures which, depending on the particular a...

The Internet is a commonly used medium for recruiting geographically dispersed, smaller populations quickly, such as young adult men-who-have-sex-with-men (YMSM). One approach to improve reach and representativeness is to employ multiple Internet platforms to recruit this hard-to-reach population. The utility of this approach has not been studied adequately, and its impact on the study sample r...

The use electronic and automatic systems for online teaching and learning are becoming the common approach in education as growing requirement in many universities word wide. This type of education system is also referred as online learning. The advantage is that it saves time, efforts and costs. There are different frameworks or platform introduced for online learning such as LMS (Learning Man...

While traditional real-time middleware such as Real-Time CORBA have shown promise as distributed software platforms for systems with time constraints, existing middleware systems lack (1) schedulability analysis and run-time enforcement mechanisms needed to give online real-time guarantees for aperiodic tasks, (2) flexible configuration mechanisms needed to manage end-to-end timing easily for a...

A parametric framework for the analysis of transcriptome data is demonstrated to yield coincident results when applied to data acquired using two different microarray platforms. Microarrays are widely employed to acquire transcriptome information, and several platforms of chips are currently in use. However, discrepancies among studies are frequently reported, particularly among those performed...

As robotic platforms are designed for human robot interaction applications, a full body sense of touch, or “sensitive skin,” becomes important. The Huggable is a new type of therapeutic robotic companion based upon relational touch interactions. The initial use of neural networks to classify the affective content of touch is described.

Resumo—The Hash (#) component model attempts to improve the practice of parallel programming. This paper introduces a type system for #-programming systems whose general objective is to increase the abstraction and safety of programming with components for parallel computing platforms. In particular, it provides an approach for safe dynamic discovering, fetching and binding of parallel componen...

Luminescent, cell-based assays capable of monitoring the aggregation potential of the disease-relevant proteins known as amylin (type 2 diabetes) and huntingtin (Huntington's disease) are presented. These sensitive platforms report on the influence of mutations as well as small molecules on protein solubility.