BACKGROUND Plague (Yersinia pestis infection) is a vector-borne disease which caused millions of human deaths in the Middle Ages. The hosts of plague are mostly rodents, and the disease is spread by the fleas that feed on them. Currently, the disease still circulates amongst sylvatic rodent populations all over the world, including great gerbil (Rhombomys opimus) populations in Central Asia. Gr...

Many factors influence a vehicle’s rate of fuel consumption. Among them are engine efficiency, speed, aerodynamics, and rolling resistance. When it comes to the influence that pavement characteristics have on fuel consumption, one of the major contributors is surface roughness which impacts rolling resistance; more energy is required to propel a vehicle over a rough surface than over a smooth s...

In 1996, the JPEG committee began to investigate possibilities for a new still image compression standard to serve current and future applications. This initiative, which was named JPEG2000, has resulted in a comprehensive standard (ISO 15444 | ITU-T Recommendation T.800) that is being issued in six parts. Part 1, in the same vein as the JPEG baseline system, is aimed at minimal complexity and ...

Endometriosis is a debilitating disease with features of chronic inflammation. Endometriosis appears to be one of the most common benign gynecological proliferations in premenopausal women since it is estimated that 10-15% of reproductive aged women suffer from pelvic endometriosis. The biology of endometriosis is unclear. Despite its prevalence, this disease remains poorly understood and curre...

Thromb Haemost 2009; 102: 426–427 Congenital abnormalities of fibrinogen that result in functional defects have been important in discoveries of structure-function relations for this protein and correlations with thrombosis and bleeding, and more than 450 such so-called dysfibrinogenaemias have been identified, although most have only been characterised very superficially. Much is now known abo...

In the centennial anniversary of the discovery of the etiologic agent of Chagas disease (Carlos Chagas discovered the disease, vector and etiologic agent all at once!), the subject is not only current, but the acute disease stills occurs. The vector-transmitted disease is already under control in Brazil, but the congenital and transfusional forms, and those by non-usual transmission, are still ...

briefly for several decades is now nearly gone, leaving behind some knowledge of disease prevention, a few controversial alarms, and a collection of techniques for assessing the health consequences of people’s actions. Among the legacies is the demise of major 20th-century epidemics attributable to tobacco, dietary fats and some carcinogens in the workplace and environment. For many, however, e...

Clinical assessment of a client (could somebody tell me why client is politically correct and patient is not?) may seem to be almost of the past. History-taking is solved for us by the huge number of assessment lists there are now in existence. One simply has to feed information into the computer and out will come the answer. My own good colleague O’Brien and his coauthors in their recent (and ...

A striking example of our sensitivity to dynamic information is our ability to infer motion from still images depicted in paintings, photographs or cartoons. What are the neural mechanisms that mediate this implied motion perception? In a recent paper, Krekelberg et al. demonstrate that form cues that imply motion are integrated with real motion information, and influence perception in both hum...