No abstract

To evaluate the role of migratory birds in the long-distance dispersal of Ixodes dammini ticks and in the spread of Lyme disease, a 6-year study of migrating birds to an offshore New England island was conducted during 1989-1994. I. dammini are not endemic on this island, therefore allowing assessment of long-distance tick dispersal rather than local infestation. Of 11,324 spring migrants examined, 1.2% were infested with I. dammini. Of 8607 fall migrants examined, 0.2% were infested. Of nymphal ticks examined, 20% were infected with Borrelia burgdorferi. OspB DNA sequencing of 6 B. burgdorferi isolates was identical to sequences of 2 strains common in coastal Maine. It is evident that bird migration allows for long-distance dispersal of I. dammini from areas where they are endemic to areas where they are not and that a few bird species account for the majority of tick dispersal. The likelihood of establishment of enzootic Lyme disease by this mechanism is discussed.

SUMMARYIn order to capture the hydro-mechanical impacts on the solid skeleton imposed by the fluid flowing through porous media at the pore-scale, the flow in the pore space has to be modeled at a resolution finer than the pores, and the no-slip condition needs to be enforced at the grain-fluid interface. In this paper, the lattice Boltzmann method (LBM), a mesoscopic Navier-Stokes solver, is shown to be an appropriate pore-scale fluid flow model.

Abstract-Medical volumetric imaging requires high fidelity, high performance rendering algorithms. We motivate and analyze new volumetric rendering algorithms that are suited to modern parallel processing architectures. First, we describe the three major categories of volume rendering algorithms and confirm through an imaging scientist-guided evaluation that ray-casting is the most acceptable. We describe a thread-and data-parallel implementation of ray-casting that makes it amenable to key architectural trends of three modern commodity parallel architectures: multi-core, GPU, and an upcoming many-core Intel R architecture code-named Larrabee. We achieve more than an order of magnitude performance improvement on a number of large 3D medical datasets. We further describe a data compression scheme that significantly reduces data-transfer overhead. This allows our approach to scale well to large numbers of Larrabee cores.

The communicative behavior of a hearing child of hearing parents was recorded from the child’s 26th week through the 17th month. Both parents communicated with the child from birth in signs and spoken words. Comparison with contemporary studies of spoken language development shows this child’s expressive communication in both modalities accelerated. It is hypothesized that the addition of a signed component may have been responsible for this child’s early acquisition of language.

No abstract

No abstract

No abstract