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The Ilumetsa site, in Estonia, consists of two round, rimmed structures that are 725 m apart. The structures are listed as proven impact craters in the Impact Earth database, despite lack of commonly accepted, unequivocal proof of extraterrestrial collision identified at this location. We excavated trenches though the Ilumetsa Large and Ilumetsa Small structures and found small pieces of charcoal within the putative proximal ejecta in both structures, in a similar geological setting as previously identified charcoal in Kaali (Losiak et al. 2016) and Morasko craters (see Szokaluk et al. 2019). Our 14C dating of charcoal allowed us to conclude that these crater‐like features formed simultaneously between 7170 and 7000 cal. years bp, about 7 ka after deglaciation of this area. A ground penetrating radar survey of the nearby bog shows that no additional Ilumetsa structures bigger than 40 m exist. Geochemical studies of the ejecta and a search using a metal detector did not reveal any clear indication of extraterrestrial material. This suggests Ilumetsa may have been formed by an impact of stony‐iron or stony body, which got significantly weathered in a wet‐temperate climate. The mystery of the formation of the structures at Ilumetsa remains; however, due to significant circumstantial evidence discussed herein, we are confident to call it a "probable" impact site. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The estimates of the age of the Kaali impact structure (Saaremaa Island, Estonia) provided by different authors vary by as much as 6000 years, ranging from ~6400 to ~400 before current era (BCE). In this study, a new age is obtained based on 14C dating charred plant material within the proximal ejecta blanket, which makes it directly related to the impact structure, and not susceptible to potential reservoir effects. Our results show that the Kaali crater was most probably formed shortly after 1530-1450 BCE (3237 ± 10 14C yr BP). Saaremaa was already inhabited when the bolide hit the Earth, thus, the crater-forming event was probably witnessed by humans. There is, however, no evidence that this event caused significant change in the material culture (e.g., known archeological artifacts) or patterns of human habitation on Saaremaa. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Surgical navigation describes the concept of real-time processing and presentation of preoperative and intraoperative data from different sources to intraoperatively provide surgeons with additional cognitive support. Imaging methods such as 3D ultrasound, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and computed tomography (CT) and data from optical, electromagnetic or mechanical tracking methods are used. The resulting information of the navigation system will be presented by the means of visual methods. Mostly virtual reality or augmented reality visualization is used. There are different guidance systems for various disciplines introduced. Mostly it operates on rigid structures (bone, brain). For soft tissue navigation motion compensation and deformation detection are necessary. Therefore, marker-based tracking methods are used in several urological application examples; however, the systems are often still under development and have not yet arrived in the clinical routine. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Radiocarbon dating of plant remains is often difficult due to the complete dissolution of the samples in the alkaline step of the ABA pretreatment. At the VERA laboratory, this problem was encountered frequently when numerous Bronze and Early Iron Age samples from the eastern Mediterranean were dated in the course of the special research program SCIEM2000 and in other collaborations with archaeologists focused on that area and time period. For these samples, only a 14C age determination of the humic acid fraction was possible. Humic acids from archaeological samples are always assessed as a second-choice material for 14C dating. It is assumed that the 14C ages may be affected by the presence of humic acids originating from other (younger) organic material, e.g. from soil horizons located above a sample. Therefore, when humic acids are dated a verification of the dates is crucial. To address this basic requirement, we started some time ago to date both fractions of charred seeds, wood, and charcoal samples whenever available, i.e. the residue after the ABA treatment and the humic acids extracted from the samples in the alkaline step. The results of this comparison showed that for the investigated eastern Mediterranean archaeological sites, 50 (out of 52) humic acid dates were in agreement with the 14C dates of the respective ABA-treated samples. Statistical analysis of the age differences leads to the conclusion that the extracted humic acids originated from the samples themselves or from contemporaneous material and were not appreciably contaminated by extraneous material of different age. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sufficient conditions are given for a classical dual exterior penalty function of a linear program (LP) to be independent of its penalty parameter. This ensures that an exact solution to the primal LP can be obtained by minimizing the dual exterior penalty function. The sufficient conditions give a precise value to such a penalty parameter introduced in [O.L. Mangasarian, Exact 1-Norm support vector machines via unconstrained convex differentiable minimization, Tech. Rep. 05-03, Data Mining Institute, Computer Sciences Department, University of Wisconsin, Madison, Wisconsin, 2005. J. Machine Learn. Res. 7, 2006, pp. 1517-1530], where no quantification of the parameter was given. Computational results on LPs with up to one million variables or constraints compare favourably to ILOG CPLEX 9.0 users manual [ILOG CPLEX 9.0 User's Manual. ILOG, Incline Village, Nevada, 2003] and validate the proposed approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The multiple instance classification problem (Dietterich et al., Artif. Intell. 89:31-71, 1998; Auer, Proceedings of 14th International Conference on Machine Learning, pp. 21-29, Morgan Kaufmann, San Mateo, 1997; Long et al., Mach. Learn. 30(1):7-22, 1998) is formulated using a linear or nonlinear kernel as theminimization of a linear function in a finite-dimensional (noninteger) real space subject to linear and bilinear constraints. A linearization algorithm is proposed that solves a succession of fast linear programs that converges in a few iterations to a local solution. Computational results on a number of datasets indicate that the proposed algorithm is competitive with the considerably more complex integer programming and other formulations. A distinguishing aspect of our linear classifier not shared by other multiple instance classifiers is the sparse number of features it utilizes. In some tasks, the reduction amounts to less than one percent of the original features. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the causes of chorea, which is a hyperkinetic movement disorder differentiated by too much spontaneous movements that are randomly distributed, irregularly timed and abrupt. Huntington's disease and the genetic syndromes that look like chorea are also described. A clinical diagnosis procedure is proposed for chorea.

Prior knowledge over arbitrary general sets is incorporated into nonlinear kernel approximation problems in the form of linear constraints in a linear program. The key tool in this incorporation is a theorem of the alternative for convex functions that converts nonlinear prior knowledge implications into linear inequalities without the need to kernelize these implications. Effectiveness of the proposed formulation is demonstrated on two synthetic examples and an important lymph node metastasis prediction problem. All these problems exhibit marked improvements upon the introduction of prior knowledge over nonlinear kernel approximation approaches that do not utilize such knowledge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study characterized autochthonous pig breeds of Vietnam and compared them with breeds from other regions. A total of 343 animals were considered from 5 indigenous pig breeds of Vietnam (Muong Khuong, Co, Meo, Tap Na, and Mong Cai), 2 exotic breeds kept in Vietnam (Landrace and Yorkshire), 3 European commercial breeds (German Landrace, Piétrain, and Large White), the Chinese breed Meishan, and the European Wild Boar. Each individual was genotyped for 20 selected polymorphic microsatellite loci. The Vietnamese autochthonous breeds showed higher degrees of polymorphism, allelic diversity, and heterozygosity than the other pig breeds. Also, large genetic diversity was observed across the area of distribution, with village-specific subpopulations, which led to significant inbreeding coefficients. As expected, genetic distances showed large differences among European-based, Chinese, and Vietnamese indigenous breeds and reflected the geographical distribution of breeds. In comparison with the European breeds, the Vietnamese indigenous pig breeds harbored a considerable amount of genetic diversity and, therefore, will be of significance for livestock bioconservation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Kind and probability of homoplasy across allelic microsatellite fragments can be investigated using DNA of genetically diverse pig breeds. In this study, nine microsatellite loci (SW1897,SW2427,SW489,SW957,TNFB,IFNG,SW2410,SW2019andS0215) were analysed using DNA samples of pigs from Vietnam (Indigenous breeds Co, Meo, Muong Khuong, Tap Na) and Germany (European Wild Boar, Piétrain). In a total of 39 sequences, 20 differences within isomorphic alleles were observed in comparison with the respective reference sequences. They affected five of the nine tested microsatellite loci. The majority (18) of SNPs occurred in the 5′-flanking regions of the microsatellite repeats, 10 were found in the 3′-flanking regions and only one SNP occurred within the repeat of the Wild Boar sequence ofSW2427. The compound microsatellitesIFNGandS0215were unaffected by size homoplasy (SH) within our material. We conclude that the fragment length analysis of microsatellites is a reliable tool for intraspecific phylogenetic studies because SH rates within a species were low. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Presents the case of a woman diagnosed with a uterine diverticulum in communication with the upper part of the endocervical canal via an ostium. Removal of the diverticulum with the uterus and ovaries; Effects of an emergency lower segment cesarean section for poor progression of labor; Cystic structure found anterior to the uterus.

Focuses on a study which described the development of a mechanical device designed to apply micromotions on osteobalsts at defined pressure. Materials and methods; Results; Discussion.