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Salt stress is one of the historically as well as potentially largest agriculture problem humans have faced. Researchers have investigated and tried to solve this problem for a long time. Over 20 reviews have been written on this topic the last five years. In this thesis the extent of salt stress in today's agriculture, the toxic and damaging effects on plants and bacteria exposed to salt stress,
The thesis proposes that understanding is a matter of experiencing a pattern. To experience a pattern involves seeing how a task, principle, or problem space is structured; to attend to the relevant information; and to be able to use that information as it relates to the knowledge domain at hand. The every day concept of understanding, which is a term used in many ways is discussed and it is explo
Many people spend hours in a workplace every week and food and drink play a central role in providing nutrition and energy and help to create breaks during the working day. However, meals are something more than the food consumed. This dissertation focuses on the meal at work, where the meal is surrounded by special circumstances when it comes to time, place and social relations, as well as the fo
The intestinal epithelium has the dual function of absorbing nutrients and water as well as being a barrier to potentially harmful substances such as macromolecules and bacteria. In the present thesis the barrier function of the intestinal mucosa was studied in vitro in Ussing diffusion chambers. Intestinal permeability to different-sized molecules was investigated and compared in various intesti
The purpose of this study was to investigate the role of protein kinases in peripheral nerve regeneration, with the use of dorsal root ganglia (DRG) and nodose ganglia explants from adult mice. The effects of neurotrophic factor stimulation and protein kinase inhibition were studied for long (days) and short term (minutes) effects. The protein kinase systems studied were protein kinase C (PKC), th
The work in thesis aims for artificial photosyntesis, which could and will mimic natural photosynthesis, the process that uses light to create energy rich compounds from H2O and CO2. Water is oxidized in Photosystem II (PSII) by the Water Oxidizing Complex (WOC), which is a catalytic site on the lumenal side of the thylakoid membrane. The chlorophyll complex P680 absorbs light and electrons are tr
Prostate cancer is one of the major causes of cancer related deaths in men in Europe and the United States. In this doctoral thesis, radioimmunoimaging and -therapy of prostate cancer was investigated pre-clinically by targeting the human kallikrein-related peptidase 2 (hK2) with radiolabelled monoclonal antibodies. hK2 is an antigen that is over-expressed in prostatic neoplasms and is closely rel
Accelerator mass spectrometry (AMS) is a highly sensitive method for counting atoms and it is used for detecting very low concentrations of both radionuclides and stable isotopes in small samples. The two major advantages of the AMS method are that the required amount of sample material is very small, but also that the efficiency is rather high, it takes less than an hour to analyse a sample. The
It it of great importance to increase the knowledge of various cell cycle kinetic parameters and the objective of this thesis is to use stochastic models to interpret Bromodeoxyuridine (BrdUrd) DNA Flow Cytometry (FCM) derived data in order to estimate such parameters. The cell cycle is the process of growth and division that is essential for an organism to increase in size. The cell cycle consist
During the last decades, coherent anti-Stokes Raman spectroscopy (CARS) has been an important tool in combustion research. The focus of this thesis is the improvement of the capability of the pure rotational CARS (RCARS) technique for this type of applications. The technique is used to measure temperatures and relative species concentrations in the gas phase and thermometry is performed by fitting
Emissions from anthropogenic combustion sources, such as light duty vehicles and small scale biomass combustion, contribute significantly to ambient aerosol particle concentrations both on local and global scales. These emissions have controlling impacts on public health and global climate. The overall aim of this thesis was to investigate how atmospheric transformation and combustion conditions a
The aim of this study is to examine the development of linguistic proficiency in written production of second-language French. In a longitudinal study of 30 months, we follow the written production of 5 guided learners of French as a second language. In order to apprehend proficiency we use the conventional parameters fluency, complexity and accuracy. The fluency and complexity are apprehended by
This thesis makes a contribution to strategy-proof social choice theory, in which one investigates the conditions under which it is possible to construct social choice functions (i.e., voting procedures) that can never be manipulated in the sense that some voter, by misrepresentation of his true preferences, can change the outcome of a voting and obtain an alternative he prefers to the one that ho
The objective of this thesis is to contribute to improved performance of district heating systems by focusing on three items. Item 1: Study of three methods for improving the performance of sub-systems within buildings connected to the distribution network. The methods can be considered as more or less innovative. Results from two of these measures are quantified in terms of so-called Primary Ener
In this thesis the focus is on crossing points in random fields and the probability distributions of various crossing variables in different applications. The crossing points are generalisations to random fields of points of level crossings by stochastic processes. Only crossing events that occur at distinct points in the parameter space are considered, for example stationary points (zero-crossing
This thesis consists of three essays on incomplete information in financial markets, two of which are theoretical, and one that is mainly of an empirical nature. All three essays concern parameter uncertainty, and they employ a continuous-time framework. The first essay, "The Effect of Information Quality on Optimal Portfolio Choice," analyzes the portfolio choices made by three types of agents,
This thesis deals with signal processing algorithms for analysis of the electrocardiogram (ECG) during atrial fibrillation (AF). Such analysis can be used for diagnosing patients, and for monitoring and predicting their response to various treatment. The thesis comprises an introduction and five papers describing methods for ECG-based modeling and characterization of AF. Paper I--IV deal with meth
It is commonly argued that the private sector needs to become actively involved for society to stand a chance of solving the most pressing global problems. This thesis, consisting of five articles previously published in refereed journals and an introductory essay, studies one case of private actor participation in global environmental governance: the Kyoto Protocol’s Clean Development Mechanism (
As quality and performance demands on today’s products increases, more and more advanced materials are being used during modern production. The problem is however that this in turn place new demands on the machining processes utilized. Even though a significant amount of research has been published on the machining of these materials knowledge is still limited in several crucial areas. A problem w
We are interested in the effect of harvesting on population fluctuations and for that purpose we develop and analyze an age-structured model where recruitment is a stochastic process and the adult segment of the population is harvested. When a constant annual harvest is taken the coefficient of variation of the adult population increases for most parameter values due to the age truncation effect,
