Following peripheral nerve injury microglia accumulate within the spinal cord and adopt a proinflammatory phenotype a process which contributes to the development of neuropathic pain. We have recently shown that neuregulin-1, a growth factor released following nerve injury, activates erbB 2, 3, and 4 receptors on microglia and stimulates proliferation, survival and chemotaxis of these cells. He...

Ventilator-associated pneumonia (VAP) has been described in humans and in experimental animals. The most severe lesions are located in dependent lung segments along a sterno-vertebral axis, however the cephalocaudal distribution of lung infection remains unknown. We used an experimental model to evaluate the distribution of lung infection, considering its anteroposterior and cephalocaudal gradi...

Through European countries the dependency ratio of elders and people with disability will rise in the next years. To avoid a degradation of the life quality of dependant persons, they may be maintained in their home. To ensure people safety and avoid isolation problems, some mechanisms are needed. We propose a new method, the X-development method, to guide generic product design from end-to-end...

Word order and accent placement are the primary linguistic means to indicate focus/background structures in German. This paper presents a pipelined architecture for the generation of German monologues with contextually appropriate word order and accent placements for the realization of focus/background structures. Our emphasis is on the sentence planner that extends the respective propositional...

 This article considers the justice of requiring employment as a condition of receiving public assistance. While none of the main theories of justice prohibits work requirements, the arguments in their favour are weak. Arguments based on reciprocity fail to explain why only means-tested public benefits should be subject to work requirements, and why unpaid dependant care work should not...