The Belt and Road Initiative is a cross-border economic belt initiated and led by the Chinese government in 2013. Its scope covers the history of the Silk Road and the Maritime Silk Road through China, Central Asia, North and West Asia, the Indian Ocean coast, the Mediterranean coast countries and regions. The country and region covered by the initiative are vast, and the impact is therefore enormous. ...

Other than the influence of ionizing radiation and benign thyroid disease, little is known about the risk factors for differentiated thyroid cancer (TC) which is an increasing common cancer worldwide. Consistent evidence shows that body mass is positively associated with TC risk. As excess weight is a state of chronic inflammation, we investigated the relationship between concentrations of leptin, ...

Gill raker divergence is a general pattern in adaptive radiations of postglacial fish, but few studies have addressed the adaptive significance of this morphological trait in foraging and eco-evolutionary interactions among predator and prey. Here, a set of subarctic lakes along a diversifying gradient of coregonids was used as the natural setting to explore correlations between gill raker numbers ...

Zoonotic infections transmitted from terrestrial and marine mammals to humans in European Arctic are of unknown significance, despite considerable potential for transmission due to local hunt and a rapidly changing environment. As an example, infection with <i>Brucella</i> bacteria may have significant impact on human health due to consumption of raw meat or otherwise contact with tissues and fluids ...

<i>Introduction</i>: Mutations affecting p53 or its upstream activator Chk2 are associated with resistance to DNA-damaging chemotherapy in breast cancer. ATM (Ataxia Telangiectasia Mutated protein) is the key activator of p53 and Chk2 in response to genotoxic stress. Here, we sought to evaluate ATM's potential role in resistance to chemotherapy.<p> <p><i>Methods</i>: We sequenced <i>ATM</i> and ...

In studies of eating behavior that have been conducted in humans, the tendency to consume more when given larger portions of food, known as the portion size effect (PSE), is one of the most robust and widely replicated findings. Despite this, the mechanisms that underpin it are still unknown. In particular, it is unclear whether the PSE arises from higher-order social and cognitive processes that ...

This chapter proposes an 'East Asian cultural knowledge framework' based on the main East Asian cultural philosophies and revisits some previous study findings in order to facilitate a deeper understanding of the East Asian tourist behaviours. The proposed framework is expected to inform researchers on, at fundamental level, the tourists' value creation and co-creation and East Asian tourists' ...

<p>This volume collects three articles which constitute the bulk of my PhD research. The overarching theme of the volume is the role of attractors - a concept from dynamical systems theory – in the neural realization of phonological grammar. <p>The motivation for this line of inquiry begins with the claim that the study of language should provide some insight into the workings of the human mind/brain. ...

Este volumen recoge quince artículos de destacados cervantistas que presentaron sus trabajos en el Congreso Internacional «<i>Cervantes en el Septentrión</i>», celebrado en la Universidad Ártica de Noruega (Tromsø), en junio de 2017. Convocado con ocasión de los 400 años de la primera edición de Los trabajos de <i>Persiles y Sigismunda, historia septentrional</i>, el congreso contó con el aval ...

The cardiothoracic ratio (CTR), a clinical metric of heart size in chest X-rays (CXRs), is a key indicator of cardiomegaly. Manual measurement of CTR is time-consuming and can be affected by human subjectivity, making it desirable to design computer-aided systems that assist clinicians in the diagnosis process. Automatic CTR estimation through chest organ segmentation, however, requires large amounts ...