Studies examining follow-up contact difficulty provide useful information for planning longitudinal studies and for assessing the validity of follow-up data. Contact difficulty was examined among 96 substance abusers following substance abuse treatment. Interview completion rates at the 3-month and 6-month follow-ups were 93 and 97%, respectively. The extent of contact efforts required to compl...

BACKGROUND Decreased lean body mass (LBM) is common in breast cancer survivors yet currently there is a lack of information regarding the determinants of LBM after treatment, in particular, the effect of physical activity and dietary factors, such as long-chain omega-3 fatty acids (LCn-3) on LBM and LBM function. This cross-sectional study explored associations of LBM and function with LCn-3 in...

For n+1 ≥ 3, we construct complete solutions to Ricci flow on R which encounter global singularities at a finite time T . The singularities are forming arbitrarily slowly with the curvature blowing up arbitrarily fast at the rate (T − t)−2λ for λ ≥ 1. Near the origin, blow-ups of such a solution converge uniformly to the Bryant soliton. Near spatial infinity, blow-ups of such a solution converg...

Intracellular protein degradation is primarily performed by the ubiquitin-proteasome system (UPS) and the autophagic-lysosomal pathway (ALP). The interplay between these two pathways has been rarely examined in intact animals and the mechanism underlying the interplay remains unclear. Hence, we sought to test in vivo and in vitro the impact of inhibition of the ALP on UPS proteolytic performanc...

The ubiquitin proteasome system (UPS) degrades abnormal proteins and most unneeded normal proteins, thereby playing a critical role in protein homeostasis in the cell. Proteasome inhibition is effective in treating certain forms of cancer, while UPS dysfunction is increasingly implicated in the pathogenesis of many severe and yet common diseases. It has been previously shown that doxorubicin (D...

MOTIVATION Sample mix-ups can arise during sample collection, handling, genotyping or data management. It is unclear how often sample mix-ups occur in genome-wide studies, as there currently are no post hoc methods that can identify these mix-ups in unrelated samples. We have therefore developed an algorithm (MixupMapper) that can both detect and correct sample mix-ups in genome-wide studies th...

This paper presents a new topology of uninterruptible power supply (UPS) by using a Z-source inverter, where a symmetrical LC network is employed to couple the main power circuit of an inverter to a battery bank. With this new topology, the proposed UPS can maintain the desired ac output voltage at the significant voltage drop of the battery bank with high efficiency, low harmonics, fast respon...