Little is known about the risk factors of human brucellosis in Jordan. A case-control study was conducted involving 56 Jordanians who had been treated for brucellosis and at least 3 matched controls for each case (n = 247). Matching was for sex, age, locality (the same village) and socioeconomic standard. Univariate and multivariate logistic regression analyses were used. In all, 17 risk factor...

In the safety-critical systems, potential hazard may jeopardize the safety of system, which can even lead to catastrophic accident. The occurrence of accident contains deterministic and non-deterministic causal logic relationships. The former refers to technical aspects, where event tree and fault tree could be applied to analyze. The latter mainly refers to operational aspects. Due to uncertai...

Invasive meningococcal disease causes over 3500 cases each year in Europe, with particularly high incidence among young children. Among serogroup B meningococci, which cause most of the cases, high diversity in the outer membrane proteins (OMPs) is observed in endemic situations; however, comprehensive molecular epidemiological data are available for the diversity and distribution of the OMPs P...

This paper introduces the notion of multidimensional fuzzy finite tree automata (MFFTA) and investigates its closure properties from the area of automata and language theory. MFFTA are a superclass of fuzzy tree automata whose behavior is generalized to adapt to multidimensional fuzzy sets. An MFFTA recognizes a multidimensional fuzzy tree language which is a regular tree language so that for e...

Being one of the most expensive components of an electrical power plant, the failures of a power transformer can result in serious power system issues. So fault diagnosis for power transformer is highly important to ensure an uninterrupted power supply. Due to information transmission mistakes as well as arisen errors while processing data in surveying and monitoring state information of transf...

Macrophage infiltration into adipose tissue during obesity and their phenotypic conversion from anti-inflammatory M2 to proinflammatory M1 subtype significantly contributes to develop a link between inflammation and insulin resistance; signaling molecule(s) for these events, however, remains poorly understood. We demonstrate here that excess lipid in the adipose tissue environment may trigger o...

P4-ATPases are transmembrane proteins unique to eukaryotes that play a fundamental role in vesicular transport. They have been proposed to act as phospholipid flippases thereby regulating lipid topology in cellular membranes. We cloned and characterized a novel murine P4-ATPase that is specifically expressed in testis, and named it FetA (flippase expressed in testis splicing form A). When expre...

OBJECTIVES To describe the research methods for the development of a new open source, cross-platform tool which processes data from the European Prospective Investigation into Cancer and Nutrition Norfolk Food Frequency Questionnaire (EPIC-Norfolk FFQ). A further aim was to compare nutrient and food group values derived from the current tool (FETA, FFQ EPIC Tool for Analysis) with the previousl...