Automated microorganism Sample Collection Module

Modified Gelman Sampler obtains representative sample of microorganism population. Proposed Sample Collection Module is based on direct inoculation of selected solid growth media encased in a cartridge at all times except during inoculation. Cartridge can be handled with no danger of contamination to sample or operator

Weight change across the start of three consecutive pregnancies and the risk of maternal morbidity and SGA birth at the second and third pregnancy

Funding: This work was funded by the Scottish Government's Rural and Environmental Science and Analytical Services Division (RESAS, Theme 7: Diet and Health). The funder had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish or preparation of the manuscript.Peer reviewedPublisher PD

DNA methyltransferase candidate polymorphisms, imprinting methylation, and birth outcome

Peer reviewedPublisher PD

An analysis of the airport experience from an air traveler perspective

This study investigates the nature of airport experience (AE) from the perspective of air travelers. This study elaborates experiential components within the airport context and highlights the associations among the components of this experience through text analysis. This study also aims to clarify how air travelers perceive airports in relation to destinations. The analysis of passenger reviews on Skytrax indicates that AE differs from the concepts of customer and tourist experiences, because hedonic and aesthetic consumptions are not primarily associated with the memorable feelings of consumers and tourists, but with aspects of functional experience and service personnel. This study reviews three aspects that air travelers associate airports with a destination. First, an airport is a representative of a destination. Second, an airport exhibits the positive characteristics of a destination. Finally, an airport is perceived as an internal component of tourism experience. This study provides theoretical and managerial implications for airport and tourism industries

Aging, Emotion, Attention, and Binding in the Taboo Stroop Task: Data and Theories.

How does aging impact relations between emotion, memory, and attention? To address this question, young and older adults named the font colors of taboo and neutral words, some of which recurred in the same font color or screen location throughout two color-naming experiments. The results indicated longer color-naming response times (RTs) for taboo than neutral base-words (taboo Stroop interference); better incidental recognition of colors and locations consistently associated with taboo versus neutral words (taboo context-memory enhancement); and greater speed-up in color-naming RTs with repetition of color-consistent than color-inconsistent taboo words, but no analogous speed-up with repetition of location-consistent or location-inconsistent taboo words (the consistency type by repetition interaction for taboo words). All three phenomena remained constant with aging, consistent with the transmission deficit hypothesis and binding theory, where familiar emotional words trigger age-invariant reactions for prioritizing the binding of contextual features to the source of emotion. Binding theory also accurately predicted the interaction between consistency type and repetition for taboo words. However, one or more aspects of these phenomena failed to support the inhibition deficit hypothesis, resource capacity theory, or socio-emotional selectivity theory. We conclude that binding theory warrants further test in a range of paradigms, and that relations between aging and emotion, memory, and attention may depend on whether the task and stimuli trigger fast-reaction, involuntary binding processes, as in the taboo Stroop paradigm

Tissue-specific regulation of sirtuin and nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide biosynthetic pathways identified in C57Bl/6 mice in response to high-fat feeding

Funding: The Scottish Government's Rural and Environment Science and Analytical Services Division.Peer reviewedPostprin

The application of time-series MODIS NDVI profiles for the acquisition of crop information across Afghanistan

We investigated and developed a prototype crop information system integrating 250 m Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) data with other available remotely sensed imagery, field data, and knowledge as part of a wider project monitoring opium and cereal crops. NDVI profiles exhibited large geographical variations in timing, height, shape, and number of peaks, with characteristics determined by underlying crop mixes, growth cycles, and agricultural practices. MODIS pixels were typically bigger than the field sizes, but profiles were indicators of crop phenology as the growth stages of the main first-cycle crops (opium poppy and cereals) were in phase. Profiles were used to investigate crop rotations, areas of newly exploited agriculture, localized variation in land management, and environmental factors such as water availability and disease. Near-real-time tracking of the current years’ profile provided forecasts of crop growth stages, early warning of drought, and mapping of affected areas. Derived data products and bulletins provided timely crop information to the UK Government and other international stakeholders to assist the development of counter-narcotic policy, plan activity, and measure progress. Results show the potential for transferring these techniques to other agricultural systems

Investigations on T violation and CPT symmetry in the neutral kaon system -- a pedagogical approach --

During the recent years experiments with neutral kaons have yielded remarkably sensitive results which are pertinent to such fundamental phenomena as CPT invariance (protecting causality), time-reversal invariance violation, coherence of wave functions, and entanglement of kaons in pair states. We describe the phenomenological developments and the theoretical conclusions drawn from the experimental material. An outlook to future experimentation is indicated.Comment: 41 pages, 9 figures. See arXiv:hep-ph/0603075 for an enlarged versio