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Abstract Noroviruses are now the leading cause of gastroenteritis worldwide. Noroviruses are effectively transmitted due to a low infectious dose, viral shedding in high concentrations, environmental stability, and they induce only a limited immunity after infection. Especially, the norovirus variants of genotype II.4 (GII.4) have seemed greatly adapted for pandemic spread. The high infectivity of
Biogenic volatile organic compounds (BVOCs) can be released from soils to the atmosphere through microbial decomposition of plant residues or soil organic carbon, root emission, evaporation of litter-stored BVOCs, and other physical processes. Soils can also act as a sink of BVOCs through biotic and abiotic uptake. Currently, the source and sink capabilities of soils have not been explicitly accou
In the last 15 years we have seen, as a response to power and thermal limits for current chip technologies, an explosion in the use of multiple and even many computer cores on a single chip. But now, to further improve performance and energy efficiency, when there are potentially hundreds of computing cores on a chip, we see a need for a specialization of individual cores and the development of he
BACKGROUND: Osteoarthritis is a leading cause of disability worldwide. Current treatment supports coping strategies to improve health-related quality of life (HRQoL). The need to predict response to treatment has been raised to personalise care. This study aims to examine change in HRQoL from baseline to three and nine months follow-up after participating in a Supported Osteoarthritis Self-Managem
Background and Objectives: There is considerable heterogeneity in the association between increasing β-amyloid (Aβ) pathology and early cognitive dysfunction in preclinical Alzheimer disease (AD). At this stage, some individuals show no signs of cognitive dysfunction, while others show clear signs of decline. The factors explaining this heterogeneity are particularly important for understanding pr
Background: The failing heart is traditionally described as metabolically inflexible and oxygen starved, causing energetic deficit and contractile dysfunction. Current metabolic modulator therapies aim to increase glucose oxidation to increase oxygen efficiency of adenosine triphosphate production, with mixed results. Methods: To investigate metabolic flexibility and oxygen delivery in the failing
We study network SIR (Susceptible - Infected - Recovered) epidemic models in the case of two interacting populations. We analyze the dynamics behavior of the fractions of infected individuals in the two populations. In contrast to the classical scalar SIR epidemic model, where the fraction of infected individuals is known to have an unimodal behavior (either decreasing throughout time or initially
Faults and errors are common in the execution of digital controllers on top of embedded hardware. Researchers from the embedded system domain devised models to understand and bound the occurrence of these faults. Using these models, control researchers have demonstrated robustness properties of control systems, and of their corresponding digital implementations. In this paper, we build a framework
Social influence is largely recognized as a key factor in opinion formation processes. Recently, the role of external forces in inducing opinion displacement and polarization in social networks has attracted significant attention. This is in particular motivated by the necessity to understand and possibly prevent interference phenomena during political campaigns and elections. In this paper, we fo
We present a new, scalable alternative to the structured singular value, which we call v, provide a convex upper bound, study their properties and compare them to l1 robust control. The analysis relies on a novel result on the relationship between robust control of dynamical systems and non-negative constant matrices.
Alzheimer's disease researchers have been intrigued by the selective regional vulnerability of the brain to amyloid-β plaques and tau neurofibrillary tangles. Post-mortem studies indicate that in ageing and Alzheimer's disease tau tangles deposit early in the transentorhinal cortex, a region located in the anterior-temporal lobe that is critical for object memory. In contrast, amyloid-β pathology
In order to identify the signal epitopes of the neuropeptide Y (NPY) molecule, the conformation of the NPY molecule was pertubated by a systematic double D-amino acid replacement of neighbouring residues. These NPY-analogs were examined for receptor affinity and on biological activity. The rat cerebral cortex and hippocampus were used for binding characteristics on Y1 and Y2 binding sites, respect
Genetic factors play an important role in the pathogenesis of osteoporosis but the genes that determine susceptibility to poor bone health are defined incompletely. Previous work has shown that a polymorphism that affects an Spl binding site in the COLIA1 gene is associated with reduced bone mineral density (BMD) and an increased risk of osteoporotic fracture in several populations. Data from cros
Partially Premixed Combustion (PPC) has shown to be a promising advanced combustion mode for future engines in terms of efficiency and emission levels. The combustion timing should be suitably phased to realize high efficiency. However, a simple constant model based predictive controller is not sufficient for controlling the combustion during transient operation. This article proposed one learning
We propose a modulus based zero-forcing (MZF) detector for multi-input multi-output (MIMO) channels. Traditionally, a ZF detector nulls out interference from other layers when detecting a certain layer. While this is conceptually simple, it can result in considerable noise-enhancement. In many communication systems, finite alphabets such as M quadrature-amplitude-modulation (QAM) are used, which c
In this paper, we consider capacity degradations stemming from potential hardware impairments (HWI) of newly proposed Large Intelligent Surface (LIS) systems. Without HWI, the utility of surface-area (the first-order derivative of the capacity with respect to surface-area) is shown to be proportional to the inverse of it. With HWI, the capacity as well as the utility of surface-area are both degra
From a control design point of view, modern diesel engines are dynamic, nonlinear, MIMO systems. This paper presents a method to find low-complexity black-box dynamic models suitable for model predictive control (MPC) of NOx and soot emissions based on on-line emissions measurements. A four-input-five-output representation of the engine is considered, with fuel injection timing, fuel injection dur
The current monolithic and lengthy scheme behind the standardization and the design of new video coding standards is becoming inappropriate to satisfy the dynamism and changing needs of the video coding community. Such a scheme and specification formalism do not enable designers to exploit the clear commonalities between the different codecs, neither at the level of the specification nor at the le
Homogeneous Charge Compression Ignition (HCCI) holds promise for reduced emissions and increased efficiency compared to conventional internal combustion engines. As HCCI lacks direct actuation over the combustion phasing, much work has been devoted to designing controllers capable of set-point tracking and disturbance rejection. This paper presents results on model predictive control (MPC) of the
