To what extent does surrounding landscape explain stand-level occurrence of conservation-relevant species in fragmented boreal and hemi-boreal forest? - a systematic review.

Background: Forestry and land-use change are leading causes of habitat loss, degradation, and fragmentation worldwide. The boreal forest biome is no exception, and only a small proportion of this forest type remains intact. Since forestry will remain a major land-use in this region, measures must be taken to ensure forest dependent biodiversity.

Antibiotic prescription: Knowledge among physicians and nurses in western Sweden.

Misuse and overuse of antibiotics are common in primary care. Guidelines for prescribing of antibiotics are often not followed We conducted a survey of 120 health centers in western Sweden to investigate to what extent physicians and nurses think they know and comply with the guidelines for prescribing of antibiotics. A large majority of the respondents answered that they know the guidelines well.

Heparin Conjugate Pretreatment of Kidneys From Deceased Donors Before Transplantation: Results From the First-in-human Randomized Phase I Trial.

Unlabelled: Pretreating porcine kidneys with Corline Heparin Conjugate (CHC) during hypothermic machine perfusion (HMP) has been shown to reduce preservation injury and improve early kidney function. In this first-in-human phase I study, the safety and tolerability of transplanting CHC-pretreated kidneys were evaluated.

Methods: CHC or placebo was added to the preservation solution during HMP of donated kidneys from deceased donors for at least 3 h before transplantation into adult patients.

Are only-children different? Evidence from a lab-in-the-field experiment of the Chinese one-child policy.

In this paper, we present evidence from a lab-in-the-field experiment of the effects of the Chinese one-child policy on adults in China who were born just before and after the introduction of the policy. We measure risk, uncertainty, and time preferences, as well as subjects' preferences in the social domain, i.e.

To what extent does surrounding landscape explain stand-level occurrence of conservation-relevant species in fragmented boreal and hemi-boreal forest?-a systematic review protocol.

Background: Silviculture and land-use change has reduced the amount of natural forest worldwide and left what remains confined to isolated fragments or stands. To understand processes governing species occurrence in such stands, much attention has been given to stand-level factors such as size, structure, and deadwood amount. However, the surrounding matrix will directly impact species dispersal and persistence, and the link between the surrounding landscape configuration, composition and history, and stand-level species occurrence has received insufficient attention.

The Singleton Fallacy: Why Current Critiques of Language Models Miss the Point.

This paper discusses the current critique against neural network-based Natural Language Understanding solutions known as . We argue that much of the current debate revolves around an argumentation error that we refer to as : the assumption that a concept (in this case, language, meaning, and understanding) refers to a single and uniform phenomenon, which in the current debate is assumed to be unobtainable by (current) language models. By contrast, we argue that positing some form of (mental) "unobtanium" as definiens for understanding inevitably leads to a dualistic position, and that such a position is precisely the original motivation for developing distributional methods in computational linguistics.

Interventions for prudent antibiotic use in primary healthcare: an econometric analysis.

Background: Rational antibiotic prescribing is crucial to combat antibiotic resistance. Optimal strategies to improve antibiotic use are not known. Strama, the Swedish strategic program against antibiotic resistance, has been successful in reducing antibiotic prescription rates.

Who is willing to stay sick for the collective? - Individual characteristics, experience, and trust.

•We study attitudes towards antibiotics and antibiotic resistance.•We analyze results from a novel web-survey of Swedish citizens (n = 1906).•Acceptability of doctor's decision not to prescribe antibiotics was found to be large.

Perfusion of Porcine Kidneys With Macromolecular Heparin Reduces Early Ischemia Reperfusion Injury.

Background: Previously, we have been able to demonstrate the possibility of coating the inner surface of the renal arteries in porcine kidneys with a heparin conjugate during hypothermic machine perfusion (HMP). The purpose of this study was to assess the efficacy of this treatment in reducing early ischemia-reperfusion injury.

Method: Brain death was induced in male landrace pigs by stepwise volume expansion of an epidural balloon catheter until negative cerebral perfusion pressure (CPP) was obtained.

Escherichia coli Bacteria Develop Adaptive Resistance to Antibacterial ZnO Nanoparticles.

Antibacterial agents based on nanoparticles (NPs) have many important applications, e.g., for the textile industry, surface disinfection, wound dressing, water treatment, and food preservation.

Enhanced protection of the renal vascular endothelium improves early outcome in kidney transplantation: Preclinical investigations in pig and mouse.

Ischemia reperfusion injury is one of the major complications responsible for delayed graft function in kidney transplantation. Applications to reduce reperfusion injury are essential due to the widespread use of kidneys from deceased organ donors where the risk for delayed graft function is especially prominent. We have recently shown that coating of inflamed or damaged endothelial cells with a unique heparin conjugate reduces thrombosis and leukocyte recruitment.

Attachment of flexible heparin chains to gelatin scaffolds improves endothelial cell infiltration.

Long-term survival of implanted cells requires oxygen and nutrients, the need for which is met by vascularization of the implant. The use of scaffolds with surface-attached heparin as anchoring points for angiogenic growth factors has been reported to improve this process. We examined the potential role of surface modification of gelatin scaffolds in promoting endothelial cell infiltration by using a unique macromolecular conjugate of heparin as a coating.

Increased heat resistance in mycelia from wood fungi prevalent in forests characterized by fire: a possible adaptation to forest fire.

Forest fires have been the major stand-replacing/modifying disturbance in boreal forests. To adapt to fire disturbance, different strategies have evolved. This study focuses on wood fungi, and a specific adaptation to forest fire: increased heat resistance in their mycelia.

Preclinical evaluation of a 68Ga-labeled biotin analogue for applications in islet transplantation.

Introduction: Islet transplantation is a promising treatment for type 1 diabetes mellitus, but the fate of the cells after intraportal infusion is unclear. It is therefore imperative to develop novel techniques for noninvasive imaging and quantification of events following islet transplantation.

Methods: Small islet-like microbeads, avidin-covered agarose resins (AARs), were used as a model system for islet transplantation.

IgE-mediated enhancement of CD4+ T cell responses in mice requires antigen presentation by CD11c+ cells and not by B cells.

IgE antibodies, administered to mice together with their specific antigen, enhance antibody and CD4(+) T cell responses to this antigen. The effect is dependent on the low affinity receptor for IgE, CD23, and the receptor must be expressed on B cells. In vitro, IgE-antigen complexes are endocytosed via CD23 on B cells, which subsequently present the antigen to CD4(+) T cells.

Lysosomal membrane permeabilization causes oxidative stress and ferritin induction in macrophages.

Moderate lysosomal membrane permeabilization (LMP) is an important inducer of apoptosis. Macrophages are professional scavengers and are rich in hydrolytic enzymes and iron. In the present study, we found that LMP by lysosomotropic detergent MSDH resulted in early up-regulation of lysosomal cathepsins, oxidative stress and ferritin up-regulation, and cell death.

Quantifying turbulent wall shear stress in a stenosed pipe using large eddy simulation.

Large eddy simulation was applied for flow of Re=2000 in a stenosed pipe in order to undertake a thorough investigation of the wall shear stress (WSS) in turbulent flow. A decomposition of the WSS into time averaged and fluctuating components is proposed. It was concluded that a scale resolving technique is required to completely describe the WSS pattern in a subject specific vessel model, since the poststenotic region was dominated by large axial and circumferential fluctuations.

Preferences for lives, injuries, and age: a stated preference survey.

One of the more difficult ethical questions from a public decision-making perspective is whether the estimation of benefits from risk reducing projects should be influenced by factors such as age groups and risk domains. For example, should a project that saves the lives of elderly people be assigned a more different benefit value in cost-benefit analyses than one that saves the same number of children's lives? This paper examines the preferences of the general public in Sweden on these issues. We design a choice experiment in which subjects are required to make six pair-wise choices where the characteristics of each choice are accident type (fire and traffic), number of fatalities and serious injuries avoided, and age of those saved (5-15-, 35-45- and 65-75-year-olds).

Value of statistical life and cause of accident: a choice experiment.

The purpose of this study is to compare the value of statistical life (VSL) estimates for traffic, drowning, and fire accidents. Using a choice experiment in a mail survey of 5,000 Swedish respondents we estimated the willingness to pay for risk reductions in the three accidents. In the experiment respondents were asked a series of questions, whether they would choose risk reducing investments where type of accident, cost of the investment, the risk reduction acquired, and the baseline risk varied between questions.

Multicriteria optimization in intensity-modulated radiation therapy treatment planning for locally advanced cancer of the pancreatic head.

Purpose: Intensity-modulated radiation therapy (IMRT) affords the potential to decrease radiation therapy-associated toxicity by creating highly conformal dose distributions. However, the inverse planning process can create a suboptimal plan despite meeting all constraints. Multicriteria optimization (MCO) may reduce the time-consuming iteration loop necessary to develop a satisfactory plan while providing information regarding trade-offs between different treatment planning goals.

Combining segment generation with direct step-and-shoot optimization in intensity-modulated radiation therapy.

A method for generating a sequence of intensity-modulated radiation therapy step-and-shoot plans with increasing number of segments is presented. The objectives are to generate high-quality plans with few, large and regular segments, and to make the planning process more intuitive. The proposed method combines segment generation with direct step-and-shoot optimization, where leaf positions and segment weights are optimized simultaneously.

In vivo h-VEGF165 gene transfer improves early endothelialisation and patency in synthetic vascular grafts.

Objectives: Small-diameter synthetic vascular graft performance is inferior to autologous vein grafts. This study tested the hypotheses that local in vivo administration of plasmids encoding for human vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF), or co-administration of plasmids encoding for human vascular endothelial growth factor/plasmids encoding for fibroblast growth factor-2 in the tissues surrounding a porous synthetic vascular graft would enhance graft endothelialisation and, consecutively, graft patency.

Methods: First, optimal gene for small-diameter synthetic graft endothelialisation was studied in rat abdominal aorta model (n=132): plasmids encoding for human vascular endothelial growth factor; co-administration of plasmids encoding for human vascular endothelial growth factor/plasmids encoding for fibroblast growth factor-2; or control plasmids were injected around 60 microm ePTFE graft.

Photon echo spectroscopy of porphyrins and heme proteins: effects of quasidegenerate electronic structure on the peak shift decay.

Three pulse photon echo peak shift spectroscopy and transient grating measurements on Zn-substituted cytochrome c, Zn-tetraphenylporphyrin, and Zn-protoporphyrin IX are reported. The effects of protein conformation, axial ligation, and solvent are investigated. Numerical simulations of the peak shift and transient grating experiments are presented.