Osteoblastoma in the occipital bone: A case report of a rare tumor in the calvarium

Osteoblastomas infrequently occur in the calvarium, displaying a preference for temporal and frontal bones when it does. We present an unusual case of a large, expansile osteoblastoma in the occipital bone of a 23-year-old man who presented with a nontender lump at the back of his head. Initial computed tomography scan showed a large occipital bone mass, and after additional imaging, a gross total resection was performed. Histopathological examination revealed an osteoblastoma. Although these tumors are benign, overlapping imaging characteristics of lesions affecting the calvarium often present a diagnostic dilemma. This case emphasizes the importance of imaging in the management and work-up of these patients to decrease the risk of complications and assists surgeons in their preoperative planning

Monuments for stillborn children: Coming to terms with the sorrow, regrets and anger

In the Netherlands, until the years mid eighty of the previous century, health care professionals like doctors, midwives and nurses determined routines around birth. As a consequence and according to the protocols at the time, stillborn children were immediately taken away after birth. Parents most often did not get a chance, nor were they allowed seeing their child. Roman Catholic rules dictated that stillborn children who had not been baptized would be buried anonymously in hideaway and in the unconsecrated grounds of the graveyard. Doctors and nurses were taught during their training that it was best not induce emotions by acquainting the parents with their stillborn child because it would be more difficult for them to handle their loss once they had become attached, seen and held, their child. Parents were not openly allowed to grieve and they were almost forced to deny and ignore their stillborn child as if it had not existed at all. The focus of this (qualitative) research in the field of ritual studies was on parents who have kept for a long time commemoration of their stillborn child within a private context. With the emergence as of 2001 of monuments to stillborn children (in the Netherlands at the moment more than 160), these parents have the opportunity to enact commemoration rituals in honour of their stillborn child and to share their individual memories with a wider audience. The purpose of the research was to study how collective and individual commemoration rituals enacted by parents at the site of a monument create meaning in coming to terms with the, often long time ago, loss of a stillborn child. According to ritual specialist Ronald Grimes rituals both do and mean something: they ‘work’ by making meaning. The results of this qualitative research show that parents of stillborn children benefit from a public place of commemoration and they finally seem to come to terms with the loss of their stillborn children and with the disrespectful way in which others handled their child at the time of their stillbirth

Effect of Feathers as Nest Insulation on Incubation Behavior and Reproductive Performance of Tree Swallows (\u3cem\u3eTachycineta bicolor\u3c/em\u3e)

Many species of birds line their nests with feathers, presumably because of the insulative qualities of feathers and because feathers may act as a barrier between nest parasites and nestlings. In 1993, we experimentally examined the role of feathers as nest insulation on the incubation behavior, nestling growth, and reproductive performance of Tree Swallows (Tachycineta bicolor) nesting in boxes in western Michigan. There were no significant differences between the incubation rhythms of females with experimental nests (i.e. no feathers) and females with control nests (i.e. with feathers). Nestlings that were reared in control nests had significantly longer right tarsi and right wing chords; their masses were significantly greater than nestlings reared in experimental nests. In addition, nested analyses of variance indicated that both female age class (i.e. second year, after second year, or after hatching year) and the brood within which a nestling was reared had significant effects on nestling growth until nestling day 12. Whether an individual nestling was infected with ectoparasites was independent of whether it was reared in an experimental or control nest. Nest insulation affected reproductive performance: females with experimental nests had significantly longer incubation periods and produced significantly fewer fledglings than did females with control nests. These results suggest that nest insulation may be an important factor influencing incubation behavior, nestling growth, and reproductive performance of Tree Swallows in western Michigan

Specificity and kinetics of the milk-clotting enzyme from cardoon (Cynara cardunculus L.) toward bovine .kappa.-casein

The action of Cynara cardunculus L. protease on whole bovine K-casein, over a 3-h period at pH 6.4, was investigated. RpHPLC of the 3% trichloroacetic acid (TCA)-solublefraction of the K-casein digestion mixture showed three peptide peaks, which were identified by amino acid analysis and N-terminal analysis as the 106-169 fragment [caseinomacropeptide (CMP)]. Upon selective precipitation with 12% TCA, one glycosylated and two nonglycosylated forms of CMP were distinguished. Analysis of the whole digestion mixture showed no additional peptides. The kinetics of hydrolysis of the PhelO5- Met106 bond was studied by spectrofluorometry, using fluorescein isothiocyanate-labeled K-casein (FTC- K-casein). The values obtained for kat, k, and k were 1.04 s-l, 0.16 pM, and 6.5 pM-l s-l, respectively. The proteolytic coefficient is of the same order of magnitude as those obtained for other milk-clotting enzymes, but the k, is significantly lower, which reflects the higher affinity of Cynara protease to K-casei

Order preserving pattern matching on trees and DAGs

The order preserving pattern matching (OPPM) problem is, given a pattern string $p$ and a text string $t$, find all substrings of $t$ which have the same relative orders as $p$. In this paper, we consider two variants of the OPPM problem where a set of text strings is given as a tree or a DAG. We show that the OPPM problem for a single pattern $p$ of length $m$ and a text tree $T$ of size $N$ can be solved in $O(m+N)$ time if the characters of $p$ are drawn from an integer alphabet of polynomial size. The time complexity becomes $O(m \log m + N)$ if the pattern $p$ is over a general ordered alphabet. We then show that the OPPM problem for a single pattern and a text DAG is NP-complete

1-hypergroups of small sizes

In this paper, we show a new construction of hypergroups that, under appropriate conditions, are complete hypergroups or non-complete 1-hypergroups. Furthermore, we classify the 1-hypergroups of size 5 and 6 based on the partition induced by the fundamental relation \u3b2. Many of these hypergroups can be obtained using the aforesaid hypergroup construction

Escherichia coli expression, refolding and characterization of human laforin

Laforin is a unique human dual-specificity phosphatase as it contains an amino terminal carbohydrate binding module (CBM). Laforin gene mutations lead to Lafora disease, a progressive myoclonus epilepsy with an early fatal issue. Previous attempts to produce recombinant laforin faced various difficulties, namely the appearance of protein inclusion bodies, the contamination with bacterial proteins and a high tendency of the protein to aggregate, despite the use of fusion tags to improve solubility and ease the purification process. In this work, we have expressed human laforin in Escherichia coli in the form of inclusion bodies devoid of any fusion tags. After a rapid dilution refolding step, the protein was purified by two chromatographic steps, yielding 5–7 mg of purified protein per liter of bacterial culture. The purified protein was shown to have the kinetic characteristics of a dual-specificity phosphatase, and a functional carbohydrate binding module. With this protocol, we were able for the first time, to produce and purify laforin without fusion tags in the amounts traditionally needed for the crystallographic structural studies paving the way to the understanding of the molecular mechanisms of laforin activity and to the development of novel therapies for Lafora disease.Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT) – Programa Operacional “Ciência, Tecnologia, Inovação” (POCTI