We used the Surface Force Apparatus (SFA) and ellipsometry techniques to study the interaction forces and the adsorption behavior of monoolein (MO), respectively. MO was adsorbed from water to a hydrophobised mica or silica surface. In addition the effect of added lipase, Thermomyces (Humicula) lanuginosa lipase (TLL), to an adsorbed layer of MO was investigated. The force versus distance curves b

Through ethnographic accounts and modern experiments it has been observed that careful heating of silica materials improves their flaking qualities. Using the scanning electron microscope, tests were carried out on a Mesolithic microblade, two Neolithic daggers, a Neolithic sickle and a Neolithic thick-butted axe, to determine if these objects had been heat treated prehistorically. Results indicat

The article argues that Java's conversion to Islam opened the door for a greater freedom for women with regard to definition as a legal person, including rights to property and unrestricted access to their offspring. This was, however, directly dependent upon how rigorously local society observed the rules found in the sunna and Koran.

Most AI planning heuristics are reachability heuristics, in the sense that they estimate the minimum plan length from the initial state to a search state. Such heuristics are best suited for use in regression state-space planners, since a progression planner would have to reconstruct the heuristic function at each new search state. However, some domains (or problem instances within a certain domai

This thesis consists of six parts in which methods for image analysis and processing are studied. Two-dimensional medical images, image sequences, and three-dimensional image volumes are considered. In the first part, the concept of optical flows (OF) is employed for restoring the contracting/expanding ventricle motion in ultrasonic echocardiograms. Radial velocities obtained by a scalar approach

We investigate the hybridization of the electron, heavy-hole and/or light-hole dispersion relations in strained InAs/GaSb quantum wells. In the considered structures, the lowest electron level lies below several hole levels at zero in-plane wave vector k(parallel to), so that the anticrossings of subbands produce gaps in the in-plane dispersions. To calculate the electronic band structures of such

Background: Smoking is a recognised risk factor for pancreatic cancer and has been associated with chronic pancreatitis and also with type II diabetes. Aims: The aim of this study was to investigate the effect of tobacco on the age of diagnosis of pancreatitis and progression of disease, as measured by the appearance of calcification and diabetes. Patients: We used data from a retrospective cohort

OBJECTIVE--Steroid hormones, especially estrogens, are known to affect hemostatic risk factors for thromboembolism, cardiovascular disease, and stroke. We examined these risk factors during depression of the serum estradiol concentration by a GnRH analogue. DESIGN--Patients were treated with a GnRH analogue, goserelin (Zoladex), 3.6 mg/inj monthly, for a period of 6 months. Blood samples were coll

Den hälsomässiga effekten som rapporteras i samband med sjuka-hus syndromet (SBS), vars orsak är okänd, kan betraktas som ett mönster av icke specifika symptom såsom irritationer i ögon, näsa och mun, upplevelser av torra sletnhinnor och hud, hudrodnad, mental trötthet och upplevelse av svag men ihållande lukt. Aven exponeringar i inomhusluften kan beskrivas som ett mönster av en mängd olika ämnen

This is the research report which was sent to the Japanese Society for the Promotion of Science, JSPS. It is a documentation of traveling as well as research activities, conferences, people I met, discussions, etc., during my JSPS postdoctoral fellowship at Tokyo Institute of Technology.

Sixty-one patients operated on for spinal stenosis, without a fusion, were studied retrospectively. Preoperative instability, as revealed by functional myelography, was found to predict a poor prognosis (P less than 0.01). Women had less favorable results (P less than 0.05). The "slipping" group was significantly more often radically decompressed than the "nonslipping" group (P less than 0.01). Po

We present two methods for variable-rate trellis quantization. Both methods utilize trellis codes based on linear congruential (LC) recursions. LC code trellises have good pseudo-random properties and are easily adapted to serve reconstruction alphabets of different sizes. The first method finds an entropy-constrained code only by optimizing over a scale factor. The scale factor modifies an initia

The objective was to study sex differences in adolescence regarding prevalence of asthma and current wheeze and to explore the association between respiratory symptoms and hereditary, lifestyle and socioeconomic factors. Young-HUNT included data comprehensive questionnaire on health, disease, lifestyle and social factors from 8817 teenagers 13-19 years conducted in 1995/97 (89% response rate). Que

Context. Manganese is an iron-peak element and although the nucleosynthesis path that leads to its formation is fairly well understood, it remains unclear which objects, SN II and/or SN Ia, that contribute the majority of Mn to the interstellar medium. It also remains unclear to which extent the supernovae Mn yields depend on the metallicity of the progenitor star or not. Aims. By using a well stu

The main topic of the thesis is the generalization of some traditional module-theoretic homological applications to complexes of modules and to differential graded modules over differential graded rings. We introduce three possible generalizations of the classical notion of annihilator of an R-module. For linear functors D (R) -> D (R), preserving the triangulation, certain inclusion results for

High-spin states in the proton-rich nucleus V-45 have been identified for the first time. A comprehensive gamma-ray decay scheme has been established following an experiment performed at the Vivitron accelerator at IReS Strasbourg by using the Euroball gamma-ray detector array coupled to the Neutron Wall and Euclides detector arrays. The natural (negative-) parity scheme is identified up to the f(