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High concentrations of salts in agricultural soils are an environmental problem that has plagued human civilization from its very beginning. Already the earliest civilizations in ancient Mesopotamia struggled with increasing concentrations of salt on irrigated fields. Also in modern times, salinization of soils, particularly of agricultural soils is still a problem restricting agricultural productSoil salinization is a pressing agricultural problem in many areas of the world, particularly in areas heavily reliant on irrigation agriculture. While the negative effects of salinity on crop plants have been widely studied, its effects on soil microorganisms have received less attention, and the impact of soil salinity on both microbial community structure and functioning is not well understood.

Background: Patients with lumbar disc herniation are treated with physiotherapy/medication and some with surgery. However, even after technically successful surgery some develop a failed back syndrome with persistent pain. Our aim was to evaluate the efficacy of epiduroscopy in patients who suffer chronic low back pain and/or radicular pain with or without surgery and the gender difference in outc

Weakly-coupled TeV-scale particles may mediate the interactions between normal matter and dark matter. If so, the LHC would produce dark matter through these mediators, leading to the familiar “mono-X” search signatures, but the mediators would also produce signals without missing momentum via the same vertices involved in their production. This document from the LHC Dark Matter Working Group sugg

Presentation of a protein antigen to T cells generally requires that the antigen be enzymatically processed into an immunogenic peptide(s). The identification of a protease(s) and its mechanism of action in the proteolysis of such an antigen is therefore a primary goal in the study of antigen processing. We show here that Insulin degrading enzyme (IDE), a neutral thiol metalloendo-proteinase that

The endogenous reparative capacity of the adult human brain is low, and chronic neurodegenerative disorders of the central nervous system represent one of the greatest areas of unmet clinical need in the developing world. Novel therapeutic strategies to treat them include: (i) growth factor delivery to boost endogenous repair and (ii) replacement cell therapy, including replacing dopaminergic neur

Summary: Osteoporotic fractures may pose a challenge for skeletal regeneration. This study investigates if pharmaceutical interventions such as bone morphogenetic protein 7 (BMP-7) alone or in combination with Zoledronate have equivalent efficacy in osteoporotic bone? Our findings suggest they do and that an osteoporotic bone environment may increase sensitivity to BMP-7. Introduction: Osteoporosi

HEIMDAL will be a multi length scale neutron scattering instrument for the study of structures covering almost nine orders of magnitude from 0.01 nm to 50 mm. The instrument is accepted for construction at the European Spallation Source (ESS) and features a variable resolution thermal neutron powder diffractometer (TNPD), combined with small angle neutron scattering (SANS) and neutron imaging (NI)

This article argues that, as individuals are already applying for refugee status in the context of disasters and climate change, a robust understanding of why disasters happen and how different groups are affected, combined with a principled methodology for determining such claims, are critical aspects of the anxious scrutiny that each claim should receive. The limitations of the “hazards” paradig

Purpose: To evaluate the association between a previously published 313 variant–based breast cancer (BC) polygenic risk score (PRS313) and contralateral breast cancer (CBC) risk, in BRCA1 and BRCA2 pathogenic variant heterozygotes. Methods: We included women of European ancestry with a prevalent first primary invasive BC (BRCA1 = 6,591 with 1,402 prevalent CBC cases; BRCA2 = 4,208 with 647 prevale

The recent randomized controlled phase III CLEAR trial results are the last to complement immune checkpoint inhibitor (ICI)-based doublet combination therapies for treatment-naïve metastatic clear-cell renal cell carcinoma. The CLEAR trial demonstrated an improved progression-free survival (PFS), overall survival (OS), and an objective response rate (ORR) benefit for the combination of lenvatinib

BACKGROUND: A resection with clear margins (R0 resection) is the most important prognostic factor in patients with locally recurrent rectal cancer (LRRC). However, this is achieved in only 60 per cent of patients. The aim of this study is to investigate whether the addition of induction chemotherapy to neoadjuvant chemo(re)irradiation improves the R0 resection rate in LRRC.METHODS: This multicentr

OBJECTIVE: Health system resilience can increase a system's ability to deal with shocks like floods. Studying health systems that currently exhibit the capacity for resilience when shocked could enhance our understanding about what generates and influences resilience. This study aimed to generate empirical knowledge on health system resilience by exploring how public antenatal and childbirth healt

Exercise Doppler echocardiography (EDE) is a well-validated tool in ischemic and valvular heart diseases. However, its use in the assessment of the right heart and pulmonary circulation unit (RH-PCU) is limited. The aim of this study is to assess the semi-recumbent bicycle EDE feasibility for the evaluation of RH-PCU in a large multi-center population, from healthy individuals and elite athletes t

A search for long-lived particles decaying into hadrons and at least one muon is presented. The analysis selects events that pass a muon or missing-transverse-momentum trigger and contain a displaced muon track and a displaced vertex. The analyzed dataset of proton-proton collisions at s=13 TeV was collected with the ATLAS detector and corresponds to 136 fb-1. The search employs dedicated reconstr

We provide a natural resource explanation for the divergence of the Portuguese economy relative to other European countries before the Second World War, based on a considerable body of contemporary sources. First, we demonstrate that a lack of domestic resources meant that Portugal experienced limited and unbalanced growth during the age of steam. Imports of coal were prohibitively expensive for i

Objective Based on clinical experience gained over many years, the maximal haemostatic effect following administration of local anaesthetics containing epinephrine is generally believed to occur within 10 minutes. Surprisingly, it was found in a recent study, in which bleeding was quantified intraoperatively, that maximal haemostasis did not occur until 30 minutes. If this is indeed the case, the

A search for supersymmetry in events with large missing transverse momentum, jets, and at least one hadronically decaying τ-lepton is presented. Two exclusive final states with either exactly one or at least two τ-leptons are considered. The analysis is based on proton-proton collisions at s=13 TeV corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 36.1 fb-1 delivered by the Large Hadron Collider and re

A search for heavy right-handed Majorana or Dirac neutrinos N R and heavy right-handed gauge bosons W R is performed in events with a pair of energetic electrons or muons, with the same or opposite electric charge, and two energetic jets. The events are selected from pp collision data with an integrated luminosity of 36.1 fb −1 collected by the ATLAS detector at s=13 TeV. No significant deviations