Streptococcus pneumoniae causes serious infections in children, the elderly, and immunocompromised patients. Protection against infections with S. pneumoniae is mediated through Abs against the capsular polysaccharides (caps-PS). We previously showed that the murine Ab response to caps-PS is dependent on CD40-CD40L interaction. In the present paper, we addressed the question of whether the CD40...

Objective Capsaicinoids (CAPs), most commonly found in chili peppers, have a multitude of pharmacological and physiological effects, such as anti-inflammation, antioxidant, and anticancer effects. In the present study, we set out to investigate the hypothesis that CAPs mitigate obesity in rats and the possible mechanisms thereof. Materials and methods Rats were divided into six groups, includ...

The cost of political campaigns in the U.S. has risen substantially in recent years. For example, real spending on congressional election campaigns doubled between 1976 and 1992 (Steven D. Levitt [1995]). There are many reasons why increased campaign spending might be socially harmful. First, increased spending means increased fund-raising, which may keep politicians from their legislative duti...

With aspect-oriented programming techniques, modularity may be achieved via separating cross-cutting concerns. Data provenance can be considered as a crosscutting concern: code for collecting provenance data is usually scattered across various places in a software system. Aspect-oriented programming allows to seamlessly integrate cross-cutting concerns into existing software applications withou...

Background Local initiatives to reduce alcohol harms are common. One UK approach, Community Alcohol Partnerships (CAPs), involves partnerships between the alcohol industry and local government, focussing on alcohol misuse and anti-social behaviour (ASB) among young people. This study aimed to assess the evidence of effectiveness of CAPs. Methods We searched CAP websites and documents, and dat...

Some new families of caps in Galois affine spaces AG(N , q) of dimension N ≡ 0 (mod 4) and odd order q are constructed. Such caps are proven to be complete by using some new ideas depending on the concept of a regular point with respect to a complete plane arc. As a corollary, an improvement on the currently known upper bounds on the size of the smallest complete caps in AG(N , q) is obtained.

A lower bound for the size of a complete cap of the polar space H(n, q2) associated to the non-degenerate Hermitian variety Un is given; this turns out to be sharp for even q when n = 3. Also, a family of caps of H(n, q2) is constructed from Fq2-maximal curves. Such caps are complete for q even, but not necessarily for q odd.

A family of caps constructed by Ebert, Metsch and T. Szönyi [8] results from projecting a Veronesian or a Grassmannian to a suitable lower-dimensional space. We improve on this construction by projecting to a space of much smaller dimension. More precisely we partition PG(3r − 1, q) into a (2r − 1)−space, an (r − 1)−space and qr − 1 cyclic caps, each of size (q2r − 1)(q − 1). We also decide whe...

We study 2009 and 2020 dark trading for U.S. stocks. Dark is lower when volume low, volatility high, in periods of markets stress. pools are more active large caps, while internalization common small caps. Traders use to jump the queue caps 2009, avoid crossing spread both years. Internalization higher spreads wide depth high. pool improves but worsens market quality 2020. discuss explanations ...