DNA damage stress: Cui prodest?

DNA is an entity shielded by mechanisms that maintain genomic stability and are essential for living cells; however, DNA is constantly subject to assaults from the environment throughout the cellular life span, making the genome susceptible to mutation and irreparable damage. Cells are prepared to mend such events through cell death as an extrema ratio to solve those threats from a multicellular perspective. However, in cells under various stress conditions, checkpoint mechanisms are activated to allow cells to have enough time to repair the damaged DNA. In yeast, entry into the cell cycle when damage is not completely repaired represents an adaptive mechanism to cope with stressful conditions. In multicellular organisms, entry into cell cycle with damaged DNA is strictly forbidden. However, in cancer development, individual cells undergo checkpoint adaptation, in which most cells die, but some survive acquiring advantageous mutations and selfishly evolve a conflictual behavior. In this review, we focus on how, in cancer development, cells rely on checkpoint adaptation to escape DNA stress and ultimately to cell death

China’s Healthcare Reform And Resources Redistribution: Lessons For Emerging Nations

Following China’s recent economic growth and healthcare reform, medical services quickly merged into the market economy. The burden of healthcare expense on the Chinese people has become a serious political issue. This research project reviews the changes in health expenditures made during the last two decades. This paper explores the cause of this rapid change in the healthcare sector and analyzes the corresponding statistics during the entire economic reform period. In addition, the paper articulates that the lack of healthcare coverage existed even before the healthcare reform formally started. As a direct result of this reform, medical resources were quickly concentrated in urban hospitals and the individual out-of¬pocket expense as the share of total health expenditures sharply increased. Recommendations are made for further healthcare reform.Healthcare, Economic transition, Redistribution, China

Energy use and indoor environment in a sample of monitored domestic buildings in the UK

This paper is based on the low-cost approaches and transferable techniques that were applied in a PhD reserch project on energy-related occupancy activities. The strengths of qualitative and quantitative research strategies were combined for the study of this socio-technical research topic. Long-term field measurement was conducted for data acquisition using self-configured monitoring schemes. Case study was selected as the research approach. Building characteristics and household features in each case study group were purposefully selected to deploy same-standard monitoring schemes. Comparable monitoring results were pre-processed following identical procedures to implement the selected data analysis methods. The inspection results provided the researcher and the associated project partners with a novel perspective to interpret the difference in actual energy consumption and indoor environment within and between the case study groups. The research methodology and moitoring approach are covered in this paper that also presents the macro-scale monitoring results of energy use and indoor environment in two case study groups. The micro-scale presentation and algorithm-based examination will be covered in other academic papers. This paper demonstrates the huge potential for some commonly applied building assessment methods to be improved by objectively considering currently overlooked aspects, such as the low-tech design and construction of heavy-weight thermal mass houses and the largely varied occupancy activities. Future work relating to the comparison of actual monitoring data with simulation results is pointed out at the end of the paper

Stochastic areas of diffusions and applications in risk theory

In this paper we study the stochastic area swept by a regular time-homogeneous diffusion till a stopping time. This unifies some recent literature in this area. Through stochastic time change we establish a link between the stochastic area and the stopping time of another associated time-homogeneous diffusion. Then we characterize the Laplace transform of the stochastic area in terms of the eigenfunctions of the associated diffusion. We also explicitly obtain the integer moments of the stochastic area in terms of scale and speed densities of the associated diffusion. Specifically we study in detail three stopping times: the first passage time to a constant level, the first drawdown time and the Azema-Yor stopping time. We also study the total occupation area of the diffusion below a constant level. We show applications of the results to a new structural model of default (Yildirim 2006), the Omega risk model of bankruptcy in risk analysis (Gerber, Shiu and Yang 2012), and a diffusion risk model with surplus-dependent tax (Albrecher and Hipp 2007, Li, Tang and Zhou 2013)

Alcune considerazioni sul rapporto tra semantica e metafisica nella teoria degli eventi di Kim

La teoria degli eventi che Kim delinea \ue8 considerata una delle pi\uf9 influenti teorie metafisiche de- gli eventi. In questo lavoro si presenta tale teoria e si esamina la sua plausibilit\ue0. In particolare, si indaga la tesi semantica di Kim secon- do cui due nominali per eventi sono coreferenziali solo se le espres- sioni predicative che essi contengono stanno per la stessa propriet\ue0. Inoltre, si esamina i) se gli eventi concepiti alla Kim debbano essere distinti dai fatti e ii) quali sono i motivi per cui tale teoria d\ue0 luogo ad una implausibile moltiplicazione degli eventi