To address some concerns about the expansion of genetically engineered pharmaceutical and industrial crops to outdoor plantings and potential impacts on the human food supply, we determined whether ...commercial agriculture seeds of maize or corn Zea mays L., barley Hordeum vulgare L., safflower Carthamus tinctorius L. and rice Oryza sativa L. are digested or pass viably through the digestive tract, or are transported externally, by captive mallard ducks Anas platyrhynchos L., ring-necked pheasants Phasianus colchicus L., red-winged blackbirds Agelaius phoeniceus (L.) and rock pigeons Columba livia Gmelin (with the exception of whole maize seeds which were too large to feed to the blackbirds). These crop seeds, whether free-fed or force-fed, did not pass through the digestive tract of these bird species. The birds nonetheless did retain viable seeds in the esophagus/crop and gizzard for several hours. For example, after foraging for 6 h, mallards had retained an average of 228 +/- 112 barley seeds and pheasants 192 +/- 78 in the esophagus/crop, and their germination rates were 93 and 50%, respectively. Birds externally transported seeds away from the feeding location, but in only four instances were seeds found attached to their muddy feet or legs and in no case to feathers. Risk of such crop seeds germinating, establishing and reproducing off site after transport by a bird (externally or internally) or movement of a carcass by a predator, will depend greatly on the crop and bird species, location, environmental conditions (including soil characteristics), timing, and seed condition.
A sensitive and versatile analytical method utilizing high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) and precolumn derivatization of 1H-4-substituted imidazole compounds is described. A HPLC method ...using 4-dimethylaminoazobenzene-4'-sulfonyl chloride (dabsyl chloride) and ultraviolet (UV) detection was developed for the analysis of histamine (HA) H3-selective compounds in human plasma, rat plasma, or homogenized rat cortical tissue. The average intra- and inter-assay variability, over a range of 10 to 0.01 microg/ml, was determined to be acceptable. The lower limit of detection for the dabsylated ligands was estimated to be <1.0 ng/ml while the lower limit of quantitation (LLOQ) was determined to be 10 ng/ml of conjugate. This assay has demonstrated it's suitability for the sensitive quantitation of several structurally diverse 1H-4-substituted imidazole HA H3-receptor antagonists in biological matrices for pharmacokinetic and biodistribution studies.
Björkman concluded that the results of his experiments with pine seedlings indicated that the important factor controlling the formation of A- and B-type ectotrophic mycorrhizal associations is the ...concentration of readily soluble reducing substance in the root which in turn is governed by the light intensity in which the plants are grown and the amounts of available nitrogen and phosphorus in the medium to which the roots are exposed. He envisages that the amounts of available nitrogen and phosphorus in the rooting medium influence the concentration of readily soluble reducing substance in the root by controlling the production of photosynthetic material and/or the utilization of photosynthetic material in the synthesis of plant tissue.
The Collaboration and Knowledge Interoperability program has described a model of team collaboration in order to facilitate the understanding of the cognitive mechanisms underlying collaborative team ...behavior. The model depicts four collaboration stages that a team traverses during a problem-solving task: knowledge construction, collaborative team problem-solving, team consensus, outcome evaluation and revision. The Integrative Decision Space (I-DecS) allows a work process to be modeled as a series of tasks, along with attributes of the organization that controls the process, the personnel assigned to that task and their nationality and proficiency. It provides a description of the decision environment from the process and organization models and introduces personnel with cultural profiles into the decision nodes. The catalyst for development of the I-DecS decision support tool was a gap in the ability of the United States military to model aspects of work processes that are important in the multinational coalition environment.
A basic life support working group of the European Resuscitation Council was set up in 1991. It was given the objective of producing agreed standards of basic life support to ensure uniform teaching ...of the techniques to health care professionals and lay people throughout Europe. A common complaint in the past, particularly from members of the public who have received instruction in basic life support, is that different organisations teach different techniques. This problem exists within countries as well as among countries. The European Resuscitation Council presents below its basic life support guidelines, which it hopes will be detailed enough to avoid any ambiguities and to be acceptable for use in all the countries represented by the council.
Recent advances in laser and electro-optical technologies have made the previously underutilized terahertz frequency band of the electromagnetic spectrum accessible for practical imaging. ...Applications are emerging, notably in the biomedical domain. In this chapter the technique of terahertz-pulsed imaging is introduced in some detail. The need for special computer vision methods, which arises from the use of pulses of radiation and the acquisition of a time series at each pixel, is described. The nature of the data is a challenge since we are interested not only in the frequency composition of the pulses, but also how these differ for different parts of the pulse. Conventional and short-time Fourier transforms and wavelets were used in preliminary experiments on the analysis of terahertz-pulsed imaging data. Measurements of refractive index and absorption coefficient were compared, wavelet compression assessed, and image classification by multi dimensional clustering techniques demonstrated. It is shown that the time-frequency methods perform as well as conventional analysis for determining material properties. Wavelet compression gave results that were robust through compressions that used only 20% of the wavelet coefficients. It is concluded that the time-frequency methods hold great promise for optimizing the extraction of the spectroscopic information contained in each terahertz pulse, for the analysis of more complex signals comprising multiple pulses or from recently introduced acquisition techniques.
Pretreatment urinary MHPG levels were examined in 28 depressed patients as a possible predictor of response to treatment with maprotiline, a tetracyclic antidepressant that exerts potent effects on ...norepinephrine uptake, but has little effect on serotonin uptake. Maprotiline was administered in doses up to 150 mg/day during the first 2 weeks after which time the dose could be increased incrementally up to 300 mg/day if indicated clinically. At 2 weeks, patients with low pretreatment urinary MHPG levels responded more favorably to treatment than did patients with high MHPG levels. At 4 weeks, patients with low MHPG levels continued to show more favorable responses; however, differences between the two groups were less clear-cut than at 2 weeks. The findings suggest the patients with low pretreatment urinary MHPG levels are more sensitive to, and respond more rapidly to, treatment with maprotiline than patients with high pretreatment urinary MHPG levels.
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