5,145 research outputs found

    Relationship of Fungal Vaginitis Therapy to Prior Antibiotic Exposure

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    Objective: To address the putative association of antibiotic use and subsequent yeast vaginitis in a population of non-pregnant women. Methods: Three hundred and sixteen women who received medical care in rural family medicine clinics enrolled in this study. Participants were pre-menopausal and non-pregnant and were followed until they used a course of antifungal therapy for vaginitis, became pregnant or moved from the catchment area. At entry subjects were free of vaginitis symptoms and had taken no antibiotics for 30 days. Patients were followed by repeated review of clinic records, hospital records and telephone or personal interviews. Data collection included documentation of episodes of antifungal treatment for vulvovaginal candidiasis and confirmed antibiotic treatment or credible history of antibiotic use prior to the use of antifungal therapy. Physician-reported uses of antibiotic and antifungal as well as patient-reported uses of these were recorded. Results: There were four reported cases of antifungal therapy following within a month of antibiotic use, in contrast to 484 antibiotic uses not followed by antifungal use. If time of observation was extended to 6 months from antibiotic use, there were 13 uses of antifungal therapy after antibiotics and 475 uses of antibiotics not followed by antifungal therapy. Conclusion: Our results cast doubt on the association of antibiotics as a putative cause of yeast vulvovaginitis

    Jet Investigations Using the Radial Moment

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    We define the radial moment, , for jets produced in hadron-hadron collisions. It can be used as a tool for studying, as a function of the jet transverse energy and pseudorapidity, radiation within the jet and the quality of a perturbative description of the jet shape. We also discuss how non-perturbative corrections to the jet transverse energy affect .Comment: 14 pages, LaTeX, 6 figure

    Global Optimization by Energy Landscape Paving

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    We introduce a novel heuristic global optimization method, energy landscape paving (ELP), which combines core ideas from energy surface deformation and tabu search. In appropriate limits, ELP reduces to existing techniques. The approach is very general and flexible and is illustrated here on two protein folding problems. For these examples, the technique gives faster convergence to the global minimum than previous approaches.Comment: to appear in Phys. Rev. Lett. (2002

    The SILCC (SImulating the LifeCycle of molecular Clouds) project: I. Chemical evolution of the supernova-driven ISM

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    The SILCC project (SImulating the Life-Cycle of molecular Clouds) aims at a more self-consistent understanding of the interstellar medium (ISM) on small scales and its link to galaxy evolution. We simulate the evolution of the multi-phase ISM in a 500 pc x 500 pc x 10 kpc region of a galactic disc, with a gas surface density of ΣGAS=10  M/pc2\Sigma_{_{\rm GAS}} = 10 \;{\rm M}_\odot/{\rm pc}^2. The Flash 4.1 simulations include an external potential, self-gravity, magnetic fields, heating and radiative cooling, time-dependent chemistry of H2_2 and CO considering (self-) shielding, and supernova (SN) feedback. We explore SN explosions at different (fixed) rates in high-density regions (peak), in random locations (random), in a combination of both (mixed), or clustered in space and time (clustered). Only random or clustered models with self-gravity (which evolve similarly) are in agreement with observations. Molecular hydrogen forms in dense filaments and clumps and contributes 20% - 40% to the total mass, whereas most of the mass (55% - 75%) is in atomic hydrogen. The ionised gas contributes <10%. For high SN rates (0.5 dex above Kennicutt-Schmidt) as well as for peak and mixed driving the formation of H2_2 is strongly suppressed. Also without self-gravity the H2_2 fraction is significantly lower (\sim 5%). Most of the volume is filled with hot gas (\sim90% within ±\pm2 kpc). Only for random or clustered driving, a vertically expanding warm component of atomic hydrogen indicates a fountain flow. Magnetic fields have little impact on the final disc structure. However, they affect dense gas (n10  cm3n\gtrsim 10\;{\rm cm}^{-3}) and delay H2_2 formation. We highlight that individual chemical species, in particular atomic hydrogen, populate different ISM phases and cannot be accurately accounted for by simple temperature-/density-based phase cut-offs.Comment: 30 pages, 23 figures, submitted to MNRAS. Comments welcome! For movies of the simulations and download of selected Flash data see the SILCC website: http://www.astro.uni-koeln.de/silc

    The SILCC project: III. Regulation of star formation and outflows by stellar winds and supernovae

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    We study the impact of stellar winds and supernovae on the multi-phase interstellar medium using three-dimensional hydrodynamical simulations carried out with FLASH. The selected galactic disc region has a size of (500 pc)2^2 x ±\pm 5 kpc and a gas surface density of 10 M_{\odot}/pc2^2. The simulations include an external stellar potential and gas self-gravity, radiative cooling and diffuse heating, sink particles representing star clusters, stellar winds from these clusters which combine the winds from indi- vidual massive stars by following their evolution tracks, and subsequent supernova explosions. Dust and gas (self-)shielding is followed to compute the chemical state of the gas with a chemical network. We find that stellar winds can regulate star (cluster) formation. Since the winds suppress the accretion of fresh gas soon after the cluster has formed, they lead to clusters which have lower average masses (102^2 - 104.3^{4.3} M_{\odot}) and form on shorter timescales (103^{-3} - 10 Myr). In particular we find an anti-correlation of cluster mass and accretion time scale. Without winds the star clusters easily grow to larger masses for ~5 Myr until the first supernova explodes. Overall the most massive stars provide the most wind energy input, while objects beginning their evolution as B-type stars contribute most of the supernova energy input. A significant outflow from the disk (mass loading \gtrsim 1 at 1 kpc) can be launched by thermal gas pressure if more than 50% of the volume near the disc mid-plane can be heated to T > 3x105^5 K. Stellar winds alone cannot create a hot volume-filling phase. The models which are in best agreement with observed star formation rates drive either no outflows or weak outflows.Comment: 23 pages; submitted to MNRA

    Implementation of a herd management system with wireless sensor networks

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    This paper investigates an adaptation of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) to cattle monitoring applications. The proposed solution facilitates the requirement for continuously assessing the condition of individual animals, aggregating and reporting this data to the farm manager. There are several existing approaches to achieving animal monitoring, ranging from using a store and forward mechanism to employing GSM-based techniques; these approaches only provide sporadic information and introduce a considerable cost in staffing and physical hardware. The core of this study is to overcome the aforementioned drawbacks by using alternative cheap, low power consumption sensor nodes capable of providing real-time communication at a reasonable hardware cost. In this paper, both the hardware and software has been designed to provide a solution which can obtain real-time data from dairy cattle whilst conforming to the limitations associated with WSNs implementations

    NNLO QCD corrections to event shape variables in electron positron annihilation

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    Precision studies of QCD at electron-positron colliders are based on measurements of event shapes and jet rates. To match the high experimental accuracy, theoretical predictions to next-to-next-to-leading order (NNLO) in QCD are needed for a reliable interpretation of the data. We report the first calculation of NNLO corrections O(alpha_s^3) to three-jet production and related event shapes, and discuss their phenomenological impact.Comment: Contributed to 2007 Europhysics Conference on High Energy Physics, Manchester, England 19-25 July 200
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