INTRODUCTION The aim of this study was to evaluate the root canal preparation in flat-oval canals treated with either rotary or self-adjusting file (SAF) by using micro-tomography analysis. METHODS Forty mandibular incisors were scanned before and after root canal instrumentation with rotary instruments (n = 20) or SAF (n = 20). Changes in canal volume, surface area, and cross-sectional geome...

Variations in the strength of the current spring snow albedo feedback (SAF) over Northern Hemisphere land surfaces (NH) explain over one third of the 21 century temperature response to anthropogenic forcings in this region within global circulation model (GCM) projections. Observation based estimates of controls on SAF are needed to constrain the snow and albedo parameterizations in these model...

OBJECTIVE Skin autofluorescence (SAF), a measure of advanced glycation end product accumulation, is associated with kidney function. We investigated the association of SAF with rate of kidney function decline in a cohort of patients with peripheral artery disease. APPROACH AND RESULTS We performed a post hoc analysis of an observational longitudinal cohort study. We included 471 patients with...

The Swarm Application Framework (SAF) is a tool that makes the development of swarm applications more intuitive. Traditionally, swarm applications are created by programming several low-level rules. This approach leads to several problems in designing and testing swarms, which serve as inspiration for the features of SAF. SAF encourages a new paradigm for designing swarm applications: engineers...

Methodologies to reprogram somatic cells into patient-specific pluripotent cells, which could potentially be used in personalized drug discovery and cell replacement therapies, are currently under development. Oct4 activation is essential for successful reprogramming and pluripotency of embryonic stem (ES) cells, albeit molecular details of Oct4 activation are not completely understood. Here we...

We develop an approach to understanding long chaotic transients in networks of excitatory pulse-coupled oscillators. Our idea is to identify a class of attractors, sequentially active firing (SAF) attractors, in terms of the temporal event structure of firing and receipt of pulses. Then all attractors can be classified into two groups: SAF attractors and non-SAF attractors. We establish that lo...

[1] Most large earthquakes in northern and central California clustered along the main trace of the San Andreas Fault (SAF), the North American-Pacific plate boundary. However, in southern California earthquakes were rather scattered. Here we suggest that such alongstrike variation of seismicity may largely reflect the geometrical impact of the SAF. Using a dynamic finite element model that inc...

This review describes recent findings based on structural and immunochemical analyses of the cell wall mannan of Candida albicans, and other medically important Candida species. Mannan has been shown to consist of α-1,2-, α-1,3-, α-1,6-, and β-1,2-linked mannopyranose units with few phosphate groups. Each Candida species has a unique mannan structure biosynthesized by sequential collaboration b...

To investigate whether cell wall mannan from Candida metapsilosis induces vasculitis similar to that in Kawasaki syndrome and anaphylactoid shock in mice, we examined the pathogenic effects of C. metapsilosis cell wall extracts. Our results show that intraperitoneal injection of cell wall extracts induced severe coronary arteritis, and intravenous injection induced acute anaphylactoid shock sim...

An operational method has been proposed to estimate the leaf area index (LAI) from satellite imagery in the framework of EUMETSAT Satellite Application Facility on Land Surface Analysis (LSA SAF). This study evaluates the performance of the LSA SAF LAI retrieval algorithm when prototyped to VEGETATION/CYCLOPES and MODIS reflectances over Europe for the 2000-2003 period. The results indicate tha...