UNLABELLED Avian keratin disorder (AKD), characterized by debilitating overgrowth of the avian beak, was first documented in black-capped chickadees (Poecile atricapillus) in Alaska. Subsequently, similar deformities have appeared in numerous species across continents. Despite the widespread distribution of this emerging pathology, the cause of AKD remains elusive. As a result, it is unknown wh...

The mechanism of the antifungal action of AKD-2C was studied by using Torulaspora delbrueckii IFO 1621 as a model. AKD-2C slightly inhibited the incorporation of radioactive precursors into protein, RNA and lipid, but not into DNA. On the other hand, AKD-2C greatly enhanced the leakage of K+ ions from treated cells and showed a potent effect on liposomal glucose leakage. Using electron microsco...

The frequency distributions and some statistical features of background aerosol concentrations were investigated at two remote China Atmosphere Watch Network (CAWNET) stations. The estimated elemental carbon (EC) background at Akdala (AKD) in the mid-latitudes of northwestern China (approximately 0.15 microg m(-3)) was only half of that at Zhuzhang (ZUZ) in low-latitude southwestern China (appr...

We report on a new way to control solvent flows in paper microfluidic devices, based on the local patterning of paper with alkyl ketene dimer (AKD) to form barriers with selective permeability for different solvents. Production of the devices is a two-step process. In the first step, AKD-treated paper (hydrophobic) is exposed to oxygen plasma for re-hydrophilization. 3D-printed masks are employ...

In this paper, the accumulated Kullback divergence (AKD) is used to analyze ASR performance deterioration due to the presence of background noise. The AKD represents a distance between the feature value distribution observed during training and the distribution of the observations in the noisy test condition for each individual feature vector component. In our experiments the AKD summed over al...

Here we present a method to manufacture peptide-concentrating MALDI-plates with alkyl ketene dimer (AKD) as a new superhydrophobic coating. The fabrication of the hydrophobic plates included application of AKD by airbrush, and negative contact printing to generate the concentration sites. Deposited sample droplets were contained within the prestructured sites, and self-adjusted onto the site if...

A process for the chemical modification of Chinese fir with alkyl ketene dimer (AKD) was studied. The hydrophobicity of the resulting products was evaluated by characterization of the equilibrium moisture content, water-surface contact angle, water absorption coefficient, and antiswelling efficiency. The results indicated that when 5% AKD solution was used, the modified wood generally showed go...

This paper describes a new search algorithm, bottom-up attribute keyness depth-first search (BU-AKD), for mining powerset lattices with the use of a monotonic approximation measure; characteristics present in many problem domains. The research reported here focuses on one of these problem domains, the discovery of Approximate Functional Dependencies (AFDs). AFDs are measured versions of functio...