Scs

The "stem cell" has become arguably one of the most important biological tools in the arsenal of translational research directed at regeneration and repair. It remains to be seen whether every tissue has its own stem cell niche, although relatively recently a large amount of research has focused on isolating and characterizing tissue-specific stem cell populations, as well as those that are able to be directed to transdifferentiate into a variety of different lineages. Traditionally, stem cells are isolated from the viable tissue of embryonic, fetal, or adult living hosts; from "fresh" donated tissues that have been surgically or otherwise removed (biopsies), or obtained directly from tissues within minutes to several hours post mortem (PM). These human progenitor/stem cell sources remain potentially highly controversial, since they are accompanied by various still-unresolved ethical, social, moral and legal challenges. Due to the limited number of "live&quo...

The whole rock K-Ar ages of basalts from the South China Sea basin vary from 3.8 to 7.9 Ma, which suggest that intra-plate volcanism after the cessation of spreading of the South China Sea (SCS) is comparable to that in adjacent regions around the SCS, i.e., Leiqiong Peninsula, northern margin of the SCS, Indochina block, and so on. Based on detailed petrographic studies, we selected many fresh basaltic rocks and measured their major element, trace element, and Sr-Nd-Pb isotope compositions. Geochemical characteristics of major element and trace element show that these basaltic rocks belong to alkali basalt magma series, and are similar to OIB-type basalt. The extent of partial melting of mantle rock in source region is very low, and magma may experience crystallization differentiation and cumulation during the ascent to or storing in the high-level magma chamber. Sr-Nd-Pb isotopic data of these basaltic rocks imply an inhomogeneous mantle below the South China Sea. The nature of magma origin has a two end-member mixing model, one is EM2 (Enriched Mantle 2) which may be originated from mantle plume, the other is DMM (Depleted MORB Mantle). Pb isotopic characteristics show the Dupal anomaly in the South China Sea, and combined with newly found Dupal anomaly at Gakkel ridge in Arctic Ocean, this implies that Dupal anomaly is not only limited to South Hemisphere. In variation diagrams among Sr, Nd and Pb, the origin nature of mantle below the SCS is similar to those below Leiqiong peninsula, northern margin of the SCS and Indochina peninsula, and is different from those below north and northeast China. This study provides geochemical constraints on Hainan mantle plume.

International organizations have been shown to be effective at mediating conflicts, yet little work has been done to examine how effective international organizations are at resolving conflicts among their own member states or future member states. This study examines territorial disputes in the European Union and determines that the EU is very effective at managing territorial disputes among its member states, and very effective at resolving territorial disputes among candidate states that wish to become members of the EU.

Soil erosion is considered to be one of the greatest environmental problems of sub-Saharan Africa. This paper investigates the advantages and disadvantages of modelling soil erosion at the continental scale and suggests an operational methodology for mapping and quantifying 10-daily water runoff and soil erosion over this scale using remote sensing data in a geographical information system framework. An attempt is made to compare the estimates of this study with general data on the severity of soil erosion over Africa and with measured rates of soil loss at different locations over the continent. The results show that the measured and estimated rates of erosion are in some areas very similar and in general within the same order of magnitude. The importance and the potential of using the soil erosion estimates with simple models and easily accessible free data for various continental-scale environmental applications are also demonstrated.

Esse artigo apresenta uma análise das incertezas e erros do modelo SCS-CN do Hydrologic Engineering Center-Hydrologic Modeling System (HEC-HMS), para eventos hidrológicos com dados de precipitação observada e estimada por RADAR na bacia do rio São Miguel em Alagoas, que controla uma área de 296 km². Foram utilizados dados fisiográficos para as estimativas iniciais dos parâmetros do SCS-CN. Em seguida, utilizando medidas simultâneas de precipitação e vazões observadas, os parâmetros foram calibrados. Utilizando-se dados independentes, os parâmetros calibrados foram validados. O coeficiente de desempenho mostrou valores de Nash-Sutcliffe de 0,93 na fase de calibração e valores entre 0,81 a 0,87 nas fases de validação. Em seguida, o modelo foi utilizado para eventos hidrológicos passados, usando dados de precipitação estimada por RADAR. Obteve-se coeficientes de Nash-Sutcliffe entre 0,75 a 0,79. O SCS-CN com as estimativas de precipitação pelo RADAR representou de forma adequada o tempo das vazões de pico, entretanto, subestimou a magnitude do pico com erros de até 26% em alguns eventos. A metodologia mostrou-se satisfatória para a bacia em estudo e pode ser uma ferramenta útil para aplicação em outras bacias hidrográfica prevendo possíveis inundações. Palavras-chave: gestão dos recursos hídricos, inundação, SCS.

In this paper we propose a color image segmentation method based on Demspter-Shaferpsilas theory. The salient aspects of the proposed method are at two levels. Firstly, the mass distributions of the Dempster-Shafer theory are directly derived from the image histogram. Secondly, the fusion of information coming from three different sources for the same image. A new strategy based on an automatic histogram thresholding is proposed to define the mass distributions in the combined framework. The proposed algorithm has been applied to the biomedical images.

International organizations have been shown to be effective at mediating conflicts, yet little work has been done to examine how effective international organizations are at resolving conflicts among their own member states or future member states. This study examines territorial disputes in the European Union and determines that the EU is very effective at managing territorial disputes among its member states, and very effective at resolving territorial disputes among candidate states that wish to become members of the EU.

Some production and quality characteristics of milk are related to kappa casein (κ-CN), prolactin (PRL) and bovine growth hormone (bGH) gene polymorphisms, which have been widely studied and applied. In particular, the Colombian cattle industry has been substantially qualified, through the use of these strategies to identify the allelic variants related and implementation of breeding programs assisted by molecular markers. In order to verify the association of SNPs of these genes with some production traits and milk quality in herds of Antioquia, 4.453 lactations of 1.631 cows from 69 dairy herds in different municipalities of Antioquia was evaluated. The analysis included features such as milk production

Digital image registration is a process by which the most accurate match is determined between two images which may have been taken at the same or different viewpoints. The registration process determines the optimal transformation which will align the two images. This has applications in many fields as diverse as medical images analysis, pattern matching and computer vision for robotics, as well as remotely sensed data processing. A wide range of registration techniques has been developed for many different types of applications and data. Exhaustive search is computationally expensive and the computational cost increases exponentially with the number of transformation parameters and the size of the data set. Therefore, in this work, we describe an efficient algorithm of image registration that uses genetic algorithms within a multi-resolution framework based on the wavelet and the nonsubsampled contourlet transform (NSCT). We combine local search methods with global ones balancing ...