Overview of Brazilian remote sensing activities

There are no author-identified significant results in this report

Some Ecological Studies of the Vegetation at the Cheyenne Bottoms Waterfowl Refuge

The purpose of this study was to collect data on the vegetation and the environmental factors influencing the growth in the Cheyenne Bottoms Waterfowl Refuge Area

POIMs: positional oligomer importance matrices—understanding support vector machine-based signal detectors

Motivation: At the heart of many important bioinformatics problems, such as gene finding and function prediction, is the classification of biological sequences. Frequently the most accurate classifiers are obtained by training support vector machines (SVMs) with complex sequence kernels. However, a cumbersome shortcoming of SVMs is that their learned decision rules are very hard to understand for humans and cannot easily be related to biological facts

Fiction as History: James Jones, \u3cem\u3eFrom Here to Eternity\u3c/em\u3e.

This study examines one of James Jones\u27s novels, From Here to Eternity,as more than a fictionalization of historic events. Juxtaposing the correspondence between the author and his brother, begun when James Jones enlisted in 1939, and the novel allows an understanding of the extent that the novel was a distillation of Jones\u27 personality and experience. Jones felt fiction must be pieced from real experiences, but also contain original emotions disguised in the pages of a novel. Analyzing Jones\u27s personal letters, interviews, and experiences offers, with some degree of certainty, the understanding that From Here to Eternity is more than merely a famous novel. It is an entertaining exposition of not only what military service does to men, but also what it emotionally did to James Jones. Thus this study reveals how much an author incorporates the essence of his historical experience-his soul -into his work

Metabiotics: novel idea or natural development of probiotic conception

Traditionally, probiotics are live microorganisms that are considered to be both beneficial and safe. Unfortunately, their effects may be short-lived, inconsequential, or ambiguous. Some symbiotic (probiotic) microorganisms with known health benefits may cause opportunistic infections, increase incidence of allergic sensitization and autoimmune disorders, produce microecological imbalance, modify gene expression, transfer genes that are virulent and resistant to antibiotics, cause disorders in epigenome and genome integrity, induce chromosomal DNA damage, and activate signaling pathways associated with cancer and other chronic diseases. As of now, the commercially available probiotics serve as a first-generation means of correcting microecological disorders. Further development will include the selection of natural metabiotics and/or formulation of synthetic (or semi-synthetic) metabiotics that will be analogies or improvised versions of natural bioactives, produced by symbiotic (probiotic) microorganisms. Metabiotics are structural components of probiotic microorganisms and/or formulation of and/or signaling molecules with a determined (known) chemical structure that can optimize host-specific physiological functions and regulate metabolic and/or behavior reactions connected with the activity of host indigenous microbiota. Metabiotics are advantageous because of their chemical structure, dosage, safety, and long shelf-life. Thus, metabiotics should not be considered a myth; they are the result of the natural evolution of probiotic conception

Praziquantel in clonorchiasis and opisthorchiasis

A single stool examination revealed pathogenic intestinal parasites in 462 (58%) of 796 vietnamese and cambodian refugees. 56 (7.0%) were infected with Clonorchis sinensis and/or Opisthorchis viverrini. These patients received Praziquantel in a dosage of 20 mg/kg bwt. p.day on 3 consecutive days. Parasitological controls were completed after 12 months. No further excretion of eggs could be detected in 88% of the patients. Concurrent infections with other trematodes and cestodes were also cured. Nematode infections remained uninfluenced. No change of haematological and biochemical parameters could be observed during therapy. Diarrhea and epigastric pain were common side effects, which are probably not effects of the drug itself. They rather seem to be due to the release of parasitic antigens. This is also indicated by a further increase of circulating Ig E after therapy