Sex pheromones form an important facet of reproductive strategies in many organisms throughout the Animal Kingdom. One of the oldest known sex pheromones in vertebrates are proteins of the Sodefrin Precursor-like Factor (SPF) system, which already had a courtship function in early salamanders. The subsequent evolution of salamanders is characterized by a diversification in courtship and reprodu...

Long exposure of UV radiation increases risk of skin diseases such as cancer and photoallergic reactions. UV-B (280-320 nm) radiation is mainly responsible for inducing the skin problems. Skin protection is a suitable method against ultraviolet radiation-induced damage. Various synthetic agents have been used as photo protective but because of their potential toxicity in humans, they have limit...

Image-based rendering (IBR) has become a very active research area in recent years. The spectral analysis problem for IBR has not been completely solved. In this paper, we present a new method to parameterize the problem, which is applicable for general-purpose IBR spectral analysis. We notice that any plenoptic function is generated by light ray emitted/reflected/refracted from the object surf...

Commensal bacteria control the micro-ecology of metazoan epithelial surfaces with pivotal effect on tissue homeostasis and host defense. In contrast to the upper respiratory tract, the lower respiratory tract of healthy individuals has largely been considered free of microorganisms. To understand airway micro-ecology we studied microbiota of sterilely excised lungs from mice of different origin...

Zusammenfassung Schülerinnen und Schüler mit sonderpädagogischem Förderbedarf (SPF) werden in Deutschland an Förderschulen inklusiv allgemeinen Schulen unterrichtet. Ein Ziel dieser inklusiven Beschulung ist eine bessere soziale Integration der SPF Gesellschaft. Inwiefern diese im Schulalltag sozial integriert sind, wird bisher wenig thematisiert. Dieser Beitrag untersucht, ob wie sich die durc...

We compared two consensus primer PCR human papillomavirus (HPV) genotyping methods for the detection of individual HPV genotypes and carcinogenic HPV genotypes as a group, using a stratified sample of enrollment cervical specimens from sexually active women participating in the NCI/Costa Rica HPV16/18 Vaccine Efficacy Trial. For the SPF(10) method, DNA was extracted from 0.1% of the cervical sp...

Superplasticforming (SPF) has become an important manufacturing method for aerospace and fuselage components. The basic reasons for the popularity of this process are reviewed and the compatibilityoffine-grained INCONELB alloy71 8SPF@ to superplasticforming are presented in this paper. The temperature limitations of current aluminum and titanium alloys employed in SPF parts for gas turbine comp...

Nonlinear stochastic dynamical systems are widely used to model physical processes. In many practical applications, the state variables are defined on a compact set of the state space, i.e., they are bounded or saturated. To estimate the states of systems with saturated variables, the Saturated Particle Filter (SPF) has recently been developed. This filter exploits the structure of the saturate...

RT-PCR for the detection of Newcastle disease virus (NDV) in allantoic fluids of SPF embryonated eggs as well as in tissues of SPF chickens infected experimentally is described. The method proved to be specific as all tested NDVs were detected and no cross reaction with other RNA viruses was observed. Sensitivity of the method was established at 10ELD50/0.1 ml. To detect NDV in chicken tissues,...

Recent researches present that packet-mode scheduling may provide overall performance advantages over cell-mode scheduling in input queueing switches. But one significant drawback of existing packet-mode schedulers is that they tend to result in longer waiting time of short packets, whose delay is critical to the performance of IP networks. To mitigate the problem, this paper proposes a simple ...