North Sea Wrecks - An interdisciplinary approach towards understanding the risks posed by wrecks containing munitions in the North Sea

Shipwrecks and dumped munitions continue to be a major hazard in the North Sea. Research within the EU Interreg project North Sea Wrecks (NSW), in cooperation with DLR, is generating new insights into the status of wrecks, the potential leakage of pollutants from munitions loads and the effects of contamination on exposed marine organisms in the North Sea environment. Further, historical documents are compared to models and visual inspections of the wreck. Samples of water, sediment and organisms are being analysed. Combining the results of these different fields of research allows for a better understanding of the environmental risks deriving from these wrecks. The extended article will detail the wreck of the SMS Mainz as a case study

Interoperable Itv Systems Based On Mheg

Today's interactive television systems are using proprietary communication protocols and interchange formats. To provide interoperability at the application level the next generation of interactive television system will be based on standardized communication protocols, monomedia and multimedia formats. This paper presents the Globally Accessible Services (GLASS) system which is a prototype interactive television system based on the Multimedia and Hypermedia Expert Group (MHEG) standard. After a brief introduction to MHEG as the multimedia interchange format between application server and set-top box in interactive television systems, the GLASS clients and servers are described, and an example scenario for navigation in the GLASS system is provided. Keywords: interactive television, multimedia systems, multimedia applications, standards, portable application 1. INTRODUCTION Global interactive television (iTV) systems have to be interoperable systems. To achieve this interoperability,..

GLASS - A Distributed MHEG-Based Multimedia System

: This paper is about GLASS 2 , a distributed multimedia system that is currently under development. The multimedia department of the IBM European Networking Center in Heidelberg, Germany, participates in the project along with other industrial and university partners. GLASS is an acronym for GLobally Accessible ServiceS, expressing the system's wide range of possible applications. Interactive TV scenarios can be presented as well as multimedia applications for interactive learning and games for entertainment. Clients for standard telecommunications services like FAX and E-mail can be included as well as presentation components providing access to hypertext-oriented internet services like WWW. The system's components can be highly distributed using networks with TCP/IP. An application is driven by MHEG-encoded presentations that allow for the definition of sophisticated presentations. The system comprises multiple server and client components. All components can be operated on a mix ..

Decorin deficiency leads to impaired angiogenesis in injured mouse cornea

Small leucine-rich proteoglycans play important roles in the organization of the extracellular matrix as well as for the regulation of cell behavior; two biological processes that are essential for angiogenesis. We investigated consequences of the targeted ablation of decorin (DCN), biglycan (BGN) and fibromodulin (FMOD) genes on inflammation-induced angiogenesis in the cornea. In wildtype mice, DCN was localized exclusively to the corneal stroma, while FMOD and BGN were more prominently expressed in epithelial cells. Endothelial cells from limbus blood vessels expressed BGN and FMOD, but no DCN. However, after induction of angiogenesis by chemical cauterization, DCN was expressed in the newly formed capillaries, together with BGN and FMOD. Notably, in DCN-deficient mice, the growth of vessels was significantly diminished, whereas it did not significantly change in FMOD- or BGN-deficient animals. Moreover, blood vessels of DCN-deficient mice exhibited a similar expression level of BGN as control mice, while FMOD was increased on day 3 after injury. These results indicate that DCN, in addition to its effects on fibrillogenesis, plays a regulatory role in angiogenesis and that FMOD in endothelial cells may be able to partially substitute for DCN