Background: Gadolinium contrast media (Gd-CM) are regarded as non-nephrotoxic or considerably less nephrotoxic than iodine contrast media (I-CM), and have therefore come to be used as a substitute for I-CM in patients with renal insufficiency in a variety of radiographic examinations. Purpose: To investigate renal histomorphological changes caused by Gd-CM in comparison with I-CM after renal X-ra

The relationships between cadmium (Cd) levels in soil, feed crops, feed concentrate, pig feed mixture, water, pig blood, and kidney from 49 farms were investigated and the possibility to use pig kidney as a bioindicator of available Cd in the agricultural environment was evaluated. There were correlations between Cd levels in soil and wheat, between wheat and barley, and between feed and kidney. T

A 2-step 'semi-nested' enterovirus PCR was developed and applied to CSF and serum specimens from 27 consecutive patients with aseptic meningitis. CSF and sera from 8 patients with non-enteroviral diagnoses were included as negative clinical controls. Enterovirus RNA was detected in CSF by PCR in 15 of the patients with aseptic meningitis, compared with 6 by virus culture. Acute-phase sera proved p

Multiple direct injection (MDI) is a promising strategy to enable fast-response ignition control as well as expansion of the homogeneous charge compression ignition (HCCI) engine operating window, thus realizing substantial reductions of soot and NOx emissions. The present paper extends a zero-dimensional-probability-density-function-based stochastic reactor model (SRM) for HCCI engines in order t

ere should be fitness costs associated with the defense, otherwise it should be permanent. Thus, in the absence of predators and with limited resources, defended individuals are expected to be outcompeted by individuals lacking the costly defense. Crucian carp, Carassius carassius, increase in body depth in response to chemical stimuli from piscivorous fish, and the deeper body constitutes a morph

One of the major issues for the design of ultra-wideband (UWB) receivers is the need to recover the signal energy dispersed over many multipath components, while keeping the receiver complexity low. To this aim we consider two schemes for reduced-complexity UWB Rake receivers, both of which combine a subset of the available resolved multipath components. The first method, called partial Rake (PRak

In this work, compulations of the air/water flow in a distributor were completed with the FLUENT two-phase VOF model and compared to experiments. The parameters of interest concerned the ratio between the deflected mass flow rate of the water phase to the mass flow rate of the water phase at the inlet called the deflection ratio as well as the recreation of the flow pattern of the different two-ph

In a variable and unpredictable environment, phenotypic plasticity in morphology or behavior may considerably improve an organism's protection against environmental threats and thereby its fitness. Here I demonstrate that common freshwater organisms, copepods (Crustacea), show a plastic response by adjusting pigmentation level in relation to two environmental threats: ultraviolet radiation (UV) an

Swedish guidelines on treatment of hyperlipidemia recommend higher cut-off levels for initiating treatment than do American guidelines, but are virtually identical for instituting and performing therapy. The aim of this study was to compare family physicians' reported practices in Sweden and Minnesota. We selected random samples of family physicians in southern Sweden and Minnesota for telephone i

To investigate why human immunodeficiency virus type 2 (HIV-2) is less virulent than HIV-1, the evolution of coreceptor usage, autologous neutralization, envelope sequence and glycosylation was studied in sequentially obtained virus isolates and sera from four HIV-2-infected individuals. Neutralization of primary HIV-2 isolates was tested by a cell line-based assay and IgG purified from patients'

Eutrophication of the Baltic Sea has potentially increased the frequency and magnitude of cyanobacteria blooms. Eutrophication leads to increased sedimentation of organic material, increasing the Extent of anoxic bottoms and subsequently increasing the internal phosphorus loading. In addition, the hypoxic water volume displays a negative relationship with the total dissolved inorganic nitrogen poo

We study the complexity of the dynamic partial sum problem in the cell-probe model. We give the model access to nondeterministic queries and prove that the problem remains hard. We give the model access to the right answer +/-1 as an oracle and prove that the problem remains hard. This suggests which kind of information is hard to maintain. From these results, we derive a number of lower bounds fo

The tumour selective ability of the boron compound boronophenylalanine (BPA), today used in Boron Neutron Capture Therapy in Sweden, has been investigated with the Lund Nuclear Microprobe. The tumour to tissue ratio of the boron concentration, as well as the location of boron within the cells, is critical for the efficiency of the therapy. It is desirable that the boron is accumulated as close as