The heritability of dental characteristics has been systematically studied in animals, human populations, families, and twins, but not in twins reared apart. Under the assumption that environmental factors are no different for monozygotic twins reared apart than for dizygotic twins reared apart, the present study measured the genetic variance of several dental characteristics in twins reared apart. Ninety-seven subjects (44 twin pairs, three triplet sets) of mean age 40.6 years (S.D. 11.7) were examined over a six-year period by means of clinical and radiographic examinations, study models, and dental history questionnaires. Characteristics assessed retrospectively were: dentate status, treatment status, treatment/caries status, tooth size, malalignment, occlusion, and morphology. Data were analyzed by two-way ANOVA, intraclass correlations, heritability estimates, and concordance. There was statistically significant resemblance within monozygotic but not dizygotic pairs in the number of teeth present (p less than 0.001), percentage of teeth and surfaces restored (p less than 0.001), percentage of teeth and surfaces restored or carious (p less than 0.001), tooth size (p less than 0.001), and malalignment (p less than 0.009). Intercanine and intermolar arch width showed significant resemblance within both monozygotic (p less than 0.001) and dizygotic (p less than 0.01, p less than 0.05) pairs, whereas overjet and overbite showed no significant resemblance within pairs. Morphological features (Carabelli's trait and mandibular first premolar groove configuration) were more highly concordant in monozygous than in dizygous twins. This study provides new evidence for a marked genetic component to dentate status and dental caries experience and confirms previous reports of acknowledged inherited contributions to tooth size, malalignment, occlusion, and morphology.

The Protein Folding Problem studies the way in which a protein -a chain of amino acids -will 'fold' into its natural state. Predicting the way in which various proteins fold can be fundamental in developing treatments of diseases such as Alzeihmers and Systic Fibrosis. Classical solutions to calculating the final conformation of a protein structure are resource-intensive. The Hydrophobic-Hydrophilic (HP) method is one way of simplifying the problem. We introduce a novel method of solving the HP protein folding problem in both two and three dimensions using Ant Colony Optimizations and a distributed programming paradigm. Tests across a small number of processors indicate that the multiple colony distributed ACO (MACO) approach is scalable and outperforms single colony implementations.

During forging, dies are subject to a complex load collective caused by combined thermally and mechanically induced stresses. Crack formation and deformation on tool surfaces, as a result of low fatigue resistance, lead to tool failure and high process costs. Grain refinement is regarded as a method to improve fatigue resistance due to enhanced ductile material properties. To generate a fine-grained microstructure in the die material, increased deformation can be applied in the metastable austenite phase, also known as ausforming. In this study, the thermo-mechanical treatment ausforming will be used to form the final contour of forging dies. For this purpose, an analogy study was performed in which a preform is ausformed. It is investigated to what extent a fine-grained microstructure can be achieved in the final forming stage. The hot-working steel X37CrMoV5-1 (AISI H11) was used as specimen material. The developed sample geometry represents the inner contour of a highly mechanically loaded forging die. To achieve optimal properties, process routes with different cooling strategies and two defined true plastic strains were examined in metallographic analysis and hardness measurements according to EN ISO 6507-1 (HV1). It is shown that, after complete austenitisation, the highest hardness values can be achieved by applying a water-air spray cooling with subsequent forming. This could be demonstrated without material failure in the samples even with a high true plastic strain.