Tendon stiffness may be involved in limiting peak musculoskeletal forces and thus may constitute an upper limit for bone strength. The patellar tendon bone (PTB) graft, which is harvested from the patellar tendon during surgical reconstruction of the anterior cruciate ligament (ACL), is an ideal scenario to test this hypothesis. Eleven participants were recruited who had undergone surgical reco...

BACKGROUND Previous genome-wide association studies (GWAS) have identified a large number of genetic variants for obesity and its related traits, representing a group of potential key genes in the etiology of obesity. Emerging evidence suggests that epigenetics may play an important role in obesity. It has not been explored whether the GWAS-identified loci contribute to obesity through epigenet...

BACKGROUND The proinflammatory cytokine interleukin-18 (IL-18) is associated with major disabling conditions, although whether as byproduct or driver is unclear. The role of common variation in the IL-18 gene on serum concentrations and functioning in old age is unknown. METHODS We used 1671 participants aged 65-80 years from two studies: the InCHIANTI study and wave 6 of the Iowa-Established...

The effects of fish farming on bacterial density, biomass, community structure and their possible link to antibiotic resistance have been investigated in coastal sediments of the Ligurian Sea (Western Mediterranean). The top 2 cm of the sediment under a fish farm and control areas were analysed during summer 2000. Bacterial density and biomass were three folds higher (up to 3 10 cells/g and 260...

We consider the general many-to-one matching model with ordinal preferences and give a procedure to partition the set of preference pro…les into subsets with the property that all preference pro…les in the same subset have the same Core. We also show how to identify a pro…le of (incomplete) binary relations containing the minimal information needed to generate as strict extensions all the (comp...

We study two cooperative solutions of a market with indivisible goods modeled as a generalized assignment game: Set-wise stability and Core. We …rst establish that the Set-wise stable set is contained in the Core and it contains the non-empty set of competitive equilibrium payo¤s. We then state and prove three limit results for replicated markets. First, the sequence of Cores of replicated mark...

In this paper, a method for quantitatively evaluating the T " integral, directly from the measured near-tip displacement ®eld in laboratory specimens made of metallic materials, is presented for the ®rst time. Following Okada and Atluri (Okada, H., Atluri, S.N., 1999. Further studies on the characteristics of the T " integral: plane stress stable crack propagation in ductile materials. Computat...

A multiple-partners assignment game with heterogeneous sales and multiunit demands consists of a set of sellers that own a given number of indivisible units of (potentially many di¤erent) goods and a set of buyers who value those units and want to buy at most an exogenously …xed number of units. We de…ne a competitive equilibrium for this generalized assignment game and prove its existence by u...

We characterize the class of strategy-proof social choice functions on the domain of symmetric single-peaked preferences. This class is strictly larger than the set of generalized median voter schemes (the class of strategy-proof and tops-only social choice functions on the domain of single-peaked preferences characterized by Moulin (1980)) since, under the domain of symmetric single-peaked pre...