The impact of breastfeeding on nasopharyngeal microbial communities in infants

Rationale: Breastfeeding elicits significant protection against respiratory tract infections in infancy. Modulation of respiratory microbiota might be part of the natural mechanisms of protection against respiratory diseases induced by breastfeeding. Objectives: To study the association between breastfeeding and nasopharyngeal microbial...

Evaporative cooling: Effective latent heat of evaporation in relation to evaporation distance from the skin

Calculation of evaporative heat loss is essential to heat balance calculations. Despite recognition that the value for latent heat of evaporation, used in these calculations, may not always reflect the real cooling benefit to the body, only limited quantitative data on this is available, which has found little use in recent literature. In this...

Characterization of Rheumatoid Arthritis Subtypes Using Symptom Profiles, Clinical Chemistry and Metabolomics Measurements

Objective: The aim is to characterize subgroups or phenotypes of rheumatoid arthritis (RA) patients using a systems biology approach. The discovery of subtypes of rheumatoid arthritis patients is an essential research area for the improvement of response to therapy and the development of personalized medicine strategies. Methods: In this study,...

Deep sequencing analyses of low density microbial communities: Working at the boundary of accurate microbiota detection

Introduction: Accurate analyses of microbiota composition of low-density communities (103-104 bacteria/sample) can be challenging. Background DNA from chemicals and consumables, extraction biases as well as differences in PCR efficiency can significantly interfere with microbiota assessment. This study was aiming to establish protocols for...

Clock accuracy analysis for a coherent IR-UWB system

The performance of a duty-cycled coherent impulse radio UWB system is typically dominated by the accuracy of its timing references. In this paper, a timing analysis is presented for an IR-UWB system to specify the accuracy requirements for the internal clocks of the transceiver. A possible clock generation unit is proposed to realize the...

A 30fJ/conversion-step 8b 0-to-10MS/s asynchronous SAR ADC in 90nm CMOS

Applications like wireless sensor nodes require ultra low-power receivers with power-efficient ADCs. Moreover, the power-efficiency should be maintained for a wide range of sampling rates to enable system-level flexibility. Previously, the use of SAR ADCs has been proposed for low-power applications [1], [2]. This work describes the...

A 2.4GHz/915MHz 51μW wake-up receiver with offset and noise suppression

In order to simultaneously optimize network lifetime and latency in wireless sensor networks (WSN), an always-on wake-up receiver (WuRx) can be used to monitor the radio link continuously. For truly autonomous sensor nodes employing energy scavenging, only 50μW power is available for the WuRx [1]. An envelope detector is a popular choice in WuRx...

Non-evaporative effects of a wet mid layer on heat transfer through protective clothing

In order to assess the non-evaporative components of the reduced thermal insulation of wet clothing, experiments were performed with a manikin and with human subjects in which two layers of underwear separated by an impermeable barrier were worn under an impermeable overgarment at 20°C, 80% RH and 0.5 ms-1 air velocity. By comparing manikin...

A CMOS image sensor with row and column profiling means

This paper describes the implementation and firstmeasurement results of a new way that obtains row and column profile data from a CMOS Image Sensor, which is developed for a micro-Digital Sun Sensor (μDSS).The basic profiling action is achieved by the pixels with p-type MOS transistors which realize a so-called "Winner Takes It All (WTIA) [1][2]...

Interaction effects of radiation and convection measured by a thermal manikin wearing protective clothing with different radiant properties

As part of the EU funded research project THERMPROTECT ('Thermal properties of protective clothing and their use') this paper deals with manikin experiments on the effects of heat radiation at different wind speeds, considering aspects related to the reflectivity of the clothing. A heated thermal manikin 'Newton' was operated with a constant...

The role of collagen in determining bone mechanical properties

The hypothesis of this study was that collagen denaturation would lead to a significant decrease in the toughness of bone, but has little effect on the stiffness of bone. Using a heating model, effects of collagen denaturation on the biomechanical properties of human cadaveric bone were examined. Prior to testing, bone specimens were heat...

Effect of collagen denaturation on the toughness of bone

The purpose of this study was to explore the relationship between the integrity of collagen and biomechanical properties of bone. In this study, age (range, 5-26 years old) and gender related changes in cortical bone samples from 33 baboon femurs (15 males and 18 females) were examined. The percentage of denatured collagen was determined using a...