Particulate air pollution is associated with respiratory morbidity and has cytotoxic and pro-inflammatory effects. The effects of diesel exhaust particles (DEP) on proliferation and apoptosis of A549 lung epithelial cells were examined. When deprived of serum (serum starvation), epithelial cell numbers fell, but DEP (5-200 microg.mL-1) prevented this. Using flow cytometric analysis of propidium...

This paper presents a neural-aided controller that enhances the fault tolerant capabilities of a high performance fighter aircraft during the landing phase when subjected to severe winds and failures such as stuck control surfaces. The controller architecture uses a neural controller aiding an existing conventional controller. The neural controller uses a feedback error learning mechanism and e...

OBJECTIVE To report the effect of weakening the superior rectus and inferior oblique (IO) muscles on ocular rotations. DESIGN Observational case series. We reviewed a 10-year period of medical records of consecutive patients who underwent bilateral 5- to 11-mm (mean, 8.0 mm; SD, 1.1 mm) superior rectus muscle recessions combined with an IO muscle recession, myectomy, or anterior transposition...

To plan efficient future PCS networks, indoor environments as well as outdoor environments must be considered. Users typically exhibit vertical motion through elevators and horizontal motion on building floors in indoor environments. A user on the way into or out of an elevator may experience difficulty in communicating with a base station (BS) due to large signal attenuation caused by the meta...

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES The PRevention of knee Osteoarthritis in Overweight Females (PROOF) study (ISRCTN 42823086) described a trend for a decrease in the incidence of knee osteoarthritis (OA) by a tailored diet and exercise program (DEP) or by oral glucosamine sulfate in women at risk for the disease, using a composite clinical and/or radiological outcome. The aim of this updated post-hoc a...

Children with spastic cerebral palsy experience difficulty with ambulation. Structural changes in muscle and fascia may play a role in abnormal gait. Myofascial structural integration (Rolfing) is a manual therapy that manipulates muscle and soft tissues to loosen fascia layers, reposition muscles, and facilitate alignment. This study aimed to document (1) gait characteristics of 2 children wit...

We present a constraint programming formulation for the elevator trip origin-destination matrix estimation problem, and study different deterministic and randomized algorithms to solve the problem. An elevator trip consists of successive stops in one direction of travel with passengers inside the elevator. It can be defined as a directed network, where the nodes correspond to the stops on the t...