Daughters of gestational diabetes (GDM) affected pregnancies are at greater risk for the development of type 2 diabetes mellitus (DM) later in life. Adiponectin is an early marker of DM risk. Dietary fat quality has been proposed to be involved…

This study attempts to expand existing knowledge on the relationship between biodiversity and ecosystem functioning, by studying a four year old tropical tree plantation. The growth of trees coming from monocultures, three species mixtures and six species mixtures was compared.…

We show that the long-standing assumption of "no-communication" between the provers of the two-prover model is not sufficiently precise to guarantee the security of a bit commitment scheme against malicious adversaries. Indeed, we show how a simple correlated random variable,…

Despite implant-supported overdentures' advantages over conventional dentures, edentulous patients often refuse dental implants for reasons that may be related to fear. Objective. The purpose of this study was to uncover and explain the various forms and sources of dental implant-related…

Designing systems with the ability to make optimal decisions under uncertainty is one of the goals of artificial intelligence. However, in many applications the design of optimal planners is complicated due to imprecise inputs and uncertain outputs resulting from stochastic…

The thesis includes two essays on asset pricing. In the first essay, "Asset Pricing in a Monetary Economy with Heterogeneous Beliefs", we shed new light on the role of monetary policy in asset pricing by focusing on the case where…

Bleomycin-induced pulmonary fibrosis (BIPF) is a disease caused by the chemotherapeutic bleomycin in which normal lung tissue is replaced with fibrous tissue that is unable to fulfill the normal functions of oxygen exchange in the lung. The development of this…

Conventional Minimum-Variance (MV) channel estimation is affected by two sources of error, namely the finite number of samples used to estimate the covariance matrix and the asymptotic bias due to interference and additive noise. On the other hand, widely linear…

The survival of breast cancer patients declines when tumors are invasive and have an increased possibility of metastasizing to distal sites. Transforming Growth Factor-beta (TGF-beta) suppresses breast cancer formation by preventing cell cycle progression in mammary epithelial cells. However, at…

The creation and manipulation of infinite images is central to Bruno's thought, but to the best of my knowledge, this has never been properly treated before. This project is a departure from much of the current scholarship on Bruno which…