Browsing Research Articles (Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Studies) by Title

Now showing items 1-20 of 66

    • After Fukushima : the precautionary principle revisited 

      Huber, Wolfgang (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 

      Muller, Sarah; Kaiser, Hannah; Kruger, Burkhard; Fitzner, Brit; Lange, Falko; Bock, Cristin N.; Nizze, Horst; Ibrahim, Saleh M.; Fuellen, Georg; Wolkenhauer, Olaf; Jaster, Robert (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 

      Alm, Rebekka; Waltemath, Dagmar; Wolfien, Markus; Wolkenhauer, Olaf; Henkel, Ron (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 

      Wollbold, Johannes; Jaster, Robert; Muller, Sarah; Rateitschak, Katja; Wolkenhauer, Olaf (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 ...

    • The archaeology of teaching and the evolution of Homo docens 

      Gardenfors, Peter; Hogberg, Anders (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 

      Stothers, Lynn; Macnab, Andrew J.; Bajunirwe, Francis; Mutabazi, Sharif; Berkowitz, Jonathan (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 

      Gardenfors, Peter; Lombard, Marlize (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 ...

    • Cell-autonomous role of GFRα1 in the development of olfactory bulb GABAergic interneurons 

      Zechel, Sabrina; Fernandez-Suarez, Diana; Ibanez, Carlos F. (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 ...

    • Childhood obesity in urban Ghana : evidence from a cross-sectional survey of in-school children aged 5–16 years 

      Ganle, John K.; Boakye, Priscilla P.; Baatiema, Leonard (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 

      Scharm, Martin; Waltemath, Dagmar; Mendes, Pedro; Wolkenhauer, Olaf (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 

      Hendry, Katharine R.; Marron, Alan O.; Vincent, Flora; Conley, Daniel J.; Gehlen, Marion; Ibarbalz, Federico M.; Queguiner, Bernard; Bowler, Chris (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 

      Getz, Wayne M.; Owen-Smith, Norman (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 

      Escaff, Daniel; Toral, Raul; Van den Broeck, Christian; Lindenberg, Katja (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 

      Butlin, Roger K.; Smadja, Carole M. (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 

      Ostaszewski, Marek; Mazein, Alexander; Gillespie, Marc E.; Kuperstein, Inna; Niarakis, Anna; Hermjakob, Henning; Pico, Alexander R.; Willighagen, Egon L.; Evelo, Chris T.; Hasenauer, Jan; Schreiber, Falk; Drager, Andreas; Demir, Emek; Wolkenhauer, Olaf; Furlong, Laura I.; Barillot, Emmanuel; Dopazo, Joaquin; Orta-Resendiz, Aurelio; Messina, Francesco; Valencia, Alfonso; Funahashi, Akira; Kitano, Hiroaki; Auffray, Charles; Balling, Rudi; Schneider, Reinhard (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 

      Tanaka, Kazuhiro; Kelly, Claire E.; Goh, Ket Yin; Lim, Kim Buay; Ibanez, Carlos F. (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 

      Daar, Abdallah S.; Jacobs, Marian; Wall, Stig; Groenewald, Johann; Eaton, Julian; Patel, Vikram; Dos Santos, Palmira; Kagee, Ashraf; Gevers, Anik; Sunkel, Charlene; Andrews, Gail; Daniels, Ingrid; Ndetei, David (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 ...

    • “Deeper into a hole?” : borrowing and lending in South Africa 

      James, Deborah (University of Chicago Press Journals, 2014-08)
      In South Africa, with upward mobility much aspired to but seldom attained, householders must spend money they have not yet earned. Borrowing both from formal institutions and smaller moneylenders (legal and illegal) positions ...

    • Demonstration and pantomime in the evolution of teaching 

      Gardenfors, Peter (Frontiers Media, 2017)
      Donald proposes that early Homo evolved mimesis as a new form of cognition. This article investigates the mimesis hypothesis in relation to the evolution of teaching. The fundamental capacities that distinguish hominin ...

    • Developmental origins of health and disease in Africa - influencing early life 

      Davies, Justine Ina; Macnab, Andrew John; Byass, Peter; Norris, Shane A.; Nyirenda, Moffat; Singhal, Atul; Sobngwi, Eugene; Daar, Abdallah S. (Elsevier, 2018)
      It is well established that Africa is undergoing rapid transitions resulting in a triple burden of malnutrition, infectious diseases, and non-communicable diseases (NCDs).1,2 That health systems are unlikely to be able to ...