Browsing Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Studies (STIAS) by Title
Now showing items 1-20 of 93
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After Fukushima : the precautionary principle revisited
(AOSIS Publishing, 2012-12-06)Etienne de Villiers, more than other theologians, elaborates on basic elements of a Christian ethics of responsibility. He distinguishes between retrospective and prospective responsibility. The prospective aspect attracted ... -
Age-dependent effects of UCP2 deficiency on experimental acute pancreatitis in mice
(PLoS, 2014-04-10)Reactive oxygen species (ROS) have been implicated in the pathogenesis of acute pancreatitis (AP) for many years but experimental evidence is still limited. Uncoupling protein 2 (UCP2)-deficient mice are an accepted model ... -
Annotation-based feature extraction from sets of SBML models
(BioMed Central, 2015-04-15)Background: Model repositories such as BioModels Database provide computational models of biological systems for the scientific community. These models contain rich semantic annotations that link model entities to concepts ... -
Anti-inflammatory effects of reactive oxygen species : a multi-valued logical model validated by formal concept analysis
(BioMed Central, 2014-09)Background: Recent findings suggest that in pancreatic acinar cells stimulated with bile acid, a pro-apoptotic effect of reactive oxygen species (ROS) dominates their effect on necrosis and spreading of inflammation. The ... -
An approach to reduce the blindness burden in sub-Saharan Africa : special focus on childhood blindness
(African Sun Media, 2020)Sub-Saharan Africa is afflicted with high levels of blindness burden, affecting the quality of life and productivity of its people. While cataracts account for over 40 per cent of blindness, uncorrected refractive error ... -
The archaeology of teaching and the evolution of Homo docens
(University of Chicago Press, 2017-4)Teaching is present in all human societies, while within other species it is very limited. Something happened during the evolution of Homo sapiens that also made us Homo docens—the teaching animal. Based on discussions ... -
Associations between the severity of obstructive lower urinary tract symptoms and care-seeking behavior in rural Africa : a cross-sectional survey from Uganda
(Public Library of Science, 2017)Background: Global estimates indicate that by 2018 2.3 billion individuals worldwide will suffer from lower urinary tract symptoms (LUTS), with 1.1 billion having LUTS related to bladder outlet obstruction (BOO). Left ... -
Causal cognition, force dynamics and early hunting technologies
(Frontiers Media, 2018)With this contribution we analyze ancient hunting technologies as one way to explore the development of causal cognition in the hominin lineage. Building on earlier work, we separate seven grades of causal thinking. By ... -
Celebrity health promotion messaging : novel opportunities to engage youth in the developmental origins of health and disease
(African Sun Media, 2020)This chapter is a personal view seen from disparate viewpoints of age and culture. Two proponents of health promotion, one a Ugandan youth with firsthand experience of the burden of illness among African children and the ... -
Cell-autonomous role of GFRα1 in the development of olfactory bulb GABAergic interneurons
(The Company of Biologists, 2018-05-18)GFRα1, a receptor for glial cell line-derived neurotrophic factor (GDNF), is critical for the development of the main olfactory system. The olfactory bulb (OB) of Gfra1 knockout mice shows significant reductions in the ... -
The challenges of breastfeeeding in poor urban areas in sub-Saharan Africa
(African Sun Media, 2020)Optimal breastfeeding has the potential to prevent more than 800 000 deaths in children younger than five years; 500 000 neonatal deaths; and 20 000 deaths in women every year. Despite these benefits, evidence from ... -
Childhood obesity in urban Ghana : evidence from a cross-sectional survey of in-school children aged 5–16 years
(BMC (part of Springer Nature), 2019-11-26)Background: Childhood obesity is a growing public health concern in many low-income urban settings; but its determinants are not clear. The purpose of this study is to assess the prevalence of childhood obesity and associated ... -
COMODI : an ontology to characterise differences in versions of computational models in biology
(BioMed Central, 2016-07-11)Background: Open model repositories provide ready-to-reuse computational models of biological systems. Models within those repositories evolve over time, leading to different model versions. Taken together, the underlying ... -
Competition between silicifiers and non-silicifiers in the past and present ocean and its evolutionary impacts
(Frontiers Media, 2018)Competition is a central part of the evolutionary process, and silicification is no exception: between biomineralized and non-biomineralized organisms, between siliceous and non-siliceous biomineralizing organisms, and ... -
Consumer-resource dynamics : quantity, quality, and allocation
(Public Library of Science, 2011-01-20)Background: The dominant paradigm for modeling the complexities of interacting populations and food webs is a system of coupled ordinary differential equations in which the state of each species, population, or functional ... -
A continuous-time persistent random walk model for flocking
(AIP Publishing, 2018)A classical random walker is characterized by a random position and velocity. This sort of random walk was originally proposed by Einstein to model Brownian motion and to demonstrate the existence of atoms and molecules. ... -
Coupling, reinforcement, and speciation
(University of Chicago Press, 2018)During the process of speciation, populations may diverge for traits and at their underlying loci that contribute barriers to gene flow. These barrier traits and barrier loci underlie individual barrier effects, by which ... -
COVID-19 Disease map, building a computational repository of SARS-CoV-2 virus-host interaction mechanisms
(Springer Nature, 2020)We announce the COVID-19 Disease Map (https://doi.org/10.17881/covid19-disease-map), an effort to build a comprehensive, standardized knowledge repository of SARS-CoV-2 virus-host interaction mechanisms, guided by input ... -
Death domain signaling by disulfide-linked dimers of the p75 neurotrophin receptor mediates neuronal death in the CNS
(Society for Neuroscience, 2016-05-18)The p75 neurotrophin receptor (p75NTR) mediates neuronal death in response to neural insults by activating a caspase apoptotic pathway. The oligomeric state and activation mechanism that enable p75NTR to mediate these ... -
Declaration on mental health in Africa : moving to implementation
(Co-Action Publishing, 2014-06-16)Urgent action is needed to address mental health issues globally. In Africa, where mental health disorders account for a huge burden of disease and disability, and where in general less than 1% of the already small health ...
