Providing clean water and sufficient affordable energy to all without compromising the environment is a key priority in the scientific community. Many recent studies have focused on carbon-based devices in the hope of addressing this grand challenge, justifying and motivating detailed studies of water in contact with carbonaceous materials. Such studies are becoming increasingly important becau...

Introduction The Millennium Development Goals laid out an ambitious agenda to improve living standards in poor countries. Now, with the Sustainable Development Goals, world leaders are aiming to set a broader agenda for 2015 and beyond: a set of universal goals that engages countries at all income levels to ensure the long-term well-being of humankind. Put another way, while the MDGs aimed to l...

There has emerged in the Western economies a strong nexus between the credit risks of fi nancial sectors and their sovereigns. We argue that this phenomenon can be understood in the context of two debt overhang problems: one affecting the fi nancial sector due to its under-capitalisation following the crisis of 2007-08; the second, affecting the non-fi nancial sector, whose incentives are crowd...

BACKGROUND In the wake of collapse of the Soviet Union, Central Asia has transformed into a key hub along the Afghan opiates trafficking routes. Around 30 percent of the heroin manufactured in Afghanistan is estimated to be smuggled through Central Asian republics in its way to booming drug markets in Russia and Eastern Europe. METHODS Building upon available evidence and extensive fieldwork ...

In this paper we develop a bubble tree structure for a degenerating class of Riemannian metrics satisfying some global conformal bounds on compact manifolds of dimension 4. Applying the bubble tree structure, we establish a gap theorem, a finiteness theorem for diffeomorphism type for this class, and make a comparison of the solutions of the σk equations on a degenerating family of Bach flat me...

Course Catalogue Description: Sample spaces, counting, random variables and their distributions , expected value, central limit theorem. Estimation and confidence intervals, hypothesis tests, analysis of variance and regression. MAT 421 does not count towards the Mathematics or Applied Mathematics major or minor. Cannot be taken for credit after successfully completing MAT 521. Course Descripti...

Electrical waveforms measured during propagation at microscopic level are considerably affected by normal variations in cardiac microstructure as well as by the superfusing fluid. On the basis of evidence we present in this article, we argue that the anisotropic waveform variations discussed here are explained primarily by the associated variations in different microstructural components of myo...

Majority of the studies reported in e-government literature identify the challenges involved in any e-government implementation from technical or project implementation perspective. In contrast, in this study, we take the citizen centric perspective to identify the factors and issues that influence the success of e-government implementation at local level. In this paper, we report the findings ...

The characterization of canopy structure is crucial for modeling eco-physiological processes. Two commonly used metrics for characterizing canopy structure are the gap fraction and the effective Plant Area Index (PAIe). Both have been successfully retrieved with terrestrial laser scanning. However, a systematic assessment of the influence of the laser scan properties on the retrieval of these m...

Recent studies have found electrical coupling to be more ubiquitous than previously thought, and coupling through gap junctions is known to play a crucial role in neuronal function and network output. In particular, current spread through gap junctions may affect the activation of voltage-dependent conductances as well as chemical synaptic release. Using voltage-clamp recordings of two strongly...