The antifungal activity of normal and host-compromised saliva on spaceflight fungal phenotypes

Phenotypic variants of parent strains ofChaetomium globosum, Trichophyton terrestre, Rhodotorula rubra, andSaccharomyces cerevisiae were exposed to pooled salivary samples contributed by healthy individuals and three groups of outpatients receiving radiation treatment for malignancies, protracted corticosteroid regimes for renal complications, and insulin therapy for diabetes mellitus. Significant variations occurred in fungal growth rates according to phenotype association with specific salivary samples.     

A preliminary study of marine fungi from Abaco Island,the Bahamas

Marine soil, mangrove wood, and free floating algal collections were made in the shallow littoral zone of Abaco Island, The Bahamas. Material was subsequently examined in the laboratory for fungal populations inhabiting seawater shorelines of the island. The study follows previous mycological investigations of Abaco including the keratinophilic fungi (10) and the fresh water fungi (11).     

Real-time software methodologies: Are they suitable for developing Manufacturing control software?

Computer-Integrated Manufacturing (CIM) systems may be classified as real-time systems. Hence, the applicability of methodologies that are developed for specifying, designing, implementing, testing, and evolving real-time software is investigated in this article. The paper highlights the activities of the software development process. Among these activities, a great emphasis is placed on automating the software requirements specification activity, and a set of formal models and languages for specifying these requirements is presented. Moreover, a synopsis of the real-time software methodologies that have been implemented by the academic and industrial communities is presented together with a critique of the strengths and weaknesses of these methodologies. The possible use of the real-time methodologies in developing the control software of efficient and dependable manufacturing systems is explored. In these systems, efficiency is achieved by increasing the level of concurrency of the operations of a plan, and by scheduling the execution of these operations with the intent of maximizing the utilization of the devices of their systems. On the other hand, dependability requires monitoring the operations of these systems. This monitoring activity facilitates the detection of faults that may occur when executing the scheduled operations of a plan, recovering from these faults, and, whenever feasible, resuming the original schedule of the system. The paper concludes that the set of surveyed methodologies may be used to develop the real-time control software of efficient and dependable manufacturing systems. However, an integrated approach to planning, scheduling, and monitoring the operations of these systems will significantly enhance their utility, and no such approach is supported by any of these methodologies.