The 22-gigabase genome of loblolly pine (Pinus taeda) is one of the largest ever sequenced. The draft assembly published in 2014 was built entirely from short Illumina reads, with lengths ranging from 100 to 250 base pairs (bp). The assembly was quite fragmented, containing over 11 million contigs whose weighted average (N50) size was 8206 bp. To improve this result, we generated approximately ...

This systematic review examines the incidence and prevalence of traumatic spinal cord injury (SCI) in different countries worldwide and their trends over time. The literature search of the studies published between 1950 and 2012 captured 1,871 articles of which 64 articles on incidence and 13 articles on prevalence fulfilled the inclusion and exclusion criteria. The global incidence of SCI vari...

When the first German Transplantationsgesetz (Transplant Act) entered into force in 1997, post-mortem organ donation had reached an all-time low at 12.5 donors per million inhabitants. The Act was intended to create safety in core medical ethics issues and improve trust in transplant medicine – the beginning of a new era. The number of postmortem organ donors increased only slowly, and compared...

The São Paulo Metropolitan Region (SPMR), currently with about 18 million inhabitants, had only 1.5 million residents in the nineteen forties. The region grew fast and steadily mainly from 1960 to 1980, the period of its consolidation as an area of significant population concentration, when the metropolitan rates of participation both in the State of São Paulo and in the Brazilian population ha...

BACKGROUND The increasing availability of generic drugs (GD) resulted in a remarkable reduction in treatment costs that allowed a better access to health care.The aim of this study is to evaluate the share of anti-asthmatic generic drugs during the period 1999-2010 in Morocco and to look at the factors influencing generic development. METHODS In this study, we used Moroccan sales data from IM...

The structure of energy-use in Indian agriculture has changed substantially, with a significant shift from the animal and human power towards machines, electricity and diesel. The total commercial energy input in Indian agriculture has increased from 425.4 × 109 Mega Joules in 1980-81 to 2592.8 × 109 Mega Joules in 2006-07. This shift, coupled with increasing commercialization and diversificati...

F. Meslé and J. Vallin, Mortality and Causes of Death in 20th-Century Ukraine, Demographic Research Monographs, DOI 10.1007/978-94-007-2433-4_3, © Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2012 In 20 years, from one census to the next, the population of Ukraine went from 30.9 million inhabitants in 1939 (RAN 1992 ) to 41.9 million in 1959 (TsSU 1962 ) . However, this steep population growth is merel...

The information revolution is in full swing, having matured over the last thirty or so years. It is estimated that there are hundreds of millions to several billion web pages on computers connected to the Internet, depending on whom you ask and the time of day. As of this writing, the google.com search engine listed 1,346,966,000 web pages in its database. Add to that email, FTP transactions, v...

Making a truly useful massively multi-agent system is difficult since the actions of the full ensemble of agents cannot be controlled by designing just one agent. It is critical to control all the agents by using protocols that describe the interaction of agents and the environment in a top-down approach. We introduce a system that uses interaction protocol descriptions and has the capability o...