Decades of robotic exploration have confirmed that in the distant past, Mars was warmer and wetter and its surface was habitable. However, none of the spacecraft missions to Mars have included among their scientific objectives the exploration of Special Regions, those places on the planet that could be inhabited by extant martian life or where terrestrial microorganisms might replicate. A major...

PURPOSE To compare the reliability, validity, and responsiveness of the Mars Letter Contrast Sensitivity (CS) Test to the Pelli-Robson CS Chart. METHODS One eye of 47 normal control subjects, 27 patients with open-angle glaucoma, and 17 with age-related macular degeneration (AMD) was tested twice with the Mars test and twice with the Pelli-Robson test, in random order on separate days. In add...

INTRODUCTION Cytokines are believed to play an important role in acute-on-chronic liver failure (ACLF). Extracorporeal liver support systems may exert beneficial effects in ACLF via removal of cytokines. At present, two systems are commercially available, the Molecular Adsorbent Recirculating System (MARS) and Fractionated Plasma Separation, Adsorption and Dialysis (Prometheus). The aim of this...

Introduction: Much of the Martian surface is obscured by dust. The bright and ubiquitous nature of this dust makes remote sensing spectral analysis of the underlying surface materials difficult or impossible. As a result, the composition and mineralogy of the substrate materials in large areas of Mars have yet to be characterized in detail. Still, even in the dustiest regions of Mars, small hol...

This report presents the results of a limited evaluation of the block cipher MARS. No important weaknesses or flaws were found on MARS. The round function of MARS looks simple but is relatively complex to analyse because of the different natures of the involved components. MARS is an iterated cipher which runs in 32 rounds, but the rounds are not of the same type, which is somewhat unusual. The...

Multivariate adaptive regression splines (MARS) has been adopted as a popular surrogate function to model the unknown relationships between input and output variables in complex systems. Searching optimal solutions on complicated response surface of MARS serves important tasks various applications. In this paper, we present an efficient effective approach find global value models that incorpora...

This paper introduces a novel hybrid approach, combining machine learning algorithms with feature selection, for efficient modelling and forecasting of complex phenomenon governed by multifactorial nonlinear behaviours, such as crop yield. We have attempted to harness the benefits soft computing algorithm multivariate adaptive regression spline (MARS) selection coupled support vector (SVR) arti...

AIM The aim of this study was to assess the effects of the molecular absorbent recirculating system (MARS) on patients with acute liver failure (ALF) and liver failure with cirrhosis (AoCLF) as well as in cholestatic patients with intractable pruritus in a Mexican population. MATERIAL AND METHODS From August 2003 to December 2011, MARS was used in 38 patients with ALF, 15 patients with AoCLF,...

Multivariate adpative regression splines (MARS) provide a flexible statistical modeling method that employs forward and backward search algorithms to identify the combination of basis functions that best fits the data and simultaneously conduct variable selection. In optimization, MARS has been used successfully to estimate the unknown functions in stochastic dynamic programming (SDP), stochast...