BACKGROUND Small vessels represent a risk factor for restenosis in percutaneous coronary angioplasty (PCA). The Sparrow® self-expanding drug-eluting stent, which has a lower profile than the current systems, has never been tested in this scenario. OBJECTIVES To evaluate the late effectiveness of the Sparrow® drug-eluting stent, regarding in-stent late lumen loss (LLL). METHODS Patients with...

The maternal determinant Bicoid (Bcd) represents the paradigm of a morphogen that provides positional information for pattern formation. However, as bicoid seems to be a recently acquired gene in flies, the question was raised as to how embryonic patterning is achieved in organisms with more ancestral modes of development. Because the phylogenetically conserved Hunchback (Hb) protein had previo...

Studies of reproductive isolation between homoploid hybrid species and their parent species have rarely been carried out. Here we investigate reproductive barriers between a recently recognized hybrid bird species, the Italian sparrow Passer italiae and its parent species, the house sparrow P. domesticus and Spanish sparrow P. hispaniolensis. Reproductive barriers can be difficult to study in h...

A stabilized hybrid form of the house sparrow (Passer domesticus) and the Spanish sparrow (P. hispaniolensis) is known as Passer italiae from the Italian Peninsula and a few Mediterranean islands. The growing attention for the Italian hybrid sparrow and increasing knowledge on its biology and genetic constitution greatly contrast the complete lack of knowledge of the long-known phenotypical hyb...

SPARROW is a stochastic local search (SLS) solver for SAT formulae in CNF format [2]. It was named after the mascot of the German city of Ulm. SPARROW2011 is a variant of SPARROW that was developed for the 2011 SAT competition. The core SPARROW2011 algorithm is identical to SPARROW; it has been re-implemented in UBCSAT [9] and a mechanism has been added to automatically select optimized paramet...

—We began our studies of House Sparrow (Passer domesticus) biparental care in the mid-1990s by applying the classic Margaret Morse Nice field technique of color-banding individuals. Over the ensuing summers, we slowly accumulated quantitative provisioning records for 100 broods, even as we commenced a series of experimental manipulations. Provisioning data showed parental fitness, as expressed ...