The different research teams involved in the study of δ Sct stars have slightly changed their strategy in the past years. The observational effort to secure worldwide coverage of case studies is continued, but the specifications become more severe, especially about target characterization and frequency resolution. After the successful launch of the Canadian satellite MOST, which will be the pio...

Fibrobacter succinogenes, a Gram-negative, anaerobic ruminal bacterium is a major fibre digesting species in the rumen. It intensively degrades plant cell walls by an erosion type of mechanism, burrowing its way through the complex matrix of cellulose and hemicellulose with the release of digestible and undigested cell wall fragments. The enzymes involved in this process include a combination o...

Portoenterostomy (PE) is the standard therapy for biliary atresia (BA). PE offers the chance of survival to children with BA. PE was the ultimate therapeutic modality for BA before liver transplantation (LT) was available. Failure of biliary drainage with PE was almost invariably fatal in children with BA. In such cases, redo-PE was performed to salvage patients following PE failure. PE remains...

The spectacularly early decline of French fertility is one of the great puzzles of economic history. There are no convincing explanations for why France entered a fertility transition over a century before anywhere else in the world. This analysis links highly detailed individual level fertility life histories to wealth at death data for four rural villages in transition-era France, 1750-1850. ...

In February 1996, the Institute for Research on Poverty and the National Center for Children in Poverty organized a national conference on the future of research and evaluation in light of the potential transfer of responsibility for welfare policies and programs to the states. The mood among participants was palpably pessimistic. If the locus of responsibility was shifted from the federal gove...

To assess youth health behaviours and related quality of life in urban Tunisia, we conducted a cross-sectional survey of a representative sample of 699 secondary-school students. The overweight rate was 20.7%. Most of the sample had an insufficient level of physical activity and were unfamiliar with the recommended frequency of moderate physical activity. Norm-based scores of psychological stat...

Recent years have witnessed an exponential growth of the commercial space industry, including rocket launch, satellite network deployment, private travel, and even extraterrestrial colonization. Several trends are predicted in this unprecedented transition to era space-enabled broadband access.