Direct growth on blood and screening agar for methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) at a tropical surveillance site was compared with broth enrichment and subsequent growth on selective MRSA agar after international sample transport. In Madagascar, 1548 swabs from an MRSA surveillance study were assessed for growth on Columbia blood agar enriched with 5% sheep blood and MRSA screen...

Characteristically shaped bifacial points are stone artefacts with which the Middle Stone Age Still Bay techno-complex in Southern Africa is identified. Traditional approaches such as chaîne opératoire and two-dimensional metrics in combination with attribute analyses have been used to analyse variability within Still Bay point assemblages. Here we develop a protocol to extract and analyse high...

Controlling spatiotemporal chaos in excitable media by applying low-amplitude perturbations locally is of immediate applicability, e.g., in treating ventricular fibrillation, a fatal disturbance in the normal rhythmic functioning of the heart. We look at a mechanism of control by the local application of a series of biphasic pulses, i.e., involving both positive and negative stimulation. This r...

We describe automated methods for constructing nonisomorphism proofs for pairs of graphs. The proofs can be human-readable or machinereadable. We have developed an experimental implementation of an interactive webpage producing a proof of (non)isomorphism when given two graphs. Mathematics Subject Classification (2000). 05C60, 68R10, 05C25, 03B35.

We present a new concept to infer the meridional flow in the deep solar interior from global oscillation data. This concept is based on the estimation of the coupling strengths of p-mode eigenfunctions mediated by the meridional flow. We illustrate the performance of the method using simulations and present first inversion results of a large-scale flow component of the meridional flow obtained ...

In this study we have decoded bar codes by recognizing the human readable characters of the interpretation line printed below the bar pattern Using this approach we were able to successfully decode bar codes with a resolution of pixels per module

Twitter is becoming an ever more popular platform for discovering and sharing information about current events, both personal and global. The scale and diversity of messages makes the discovery and analysis of breaking news very challenging. Nonetheless, journalists and other news consumers are increasingly relying on tools to help them make sense of Twitter. Here, we describe a fully-automated...

The Granada agar plate (GAP; Biomedics SL, Madrid, Spain) was evaluated for the detection of group B streptococci (GBS) in urine specimens from pregnant women submitted for testing for asymptomatic bacteriuria and was compared with blood agar (BA [Columbia agar with 5% sheep blood]; bioMérieux, Marcy l'Etoile, France). The GAP detected 103 out of 105 GBS, whereas BA detected only 50. Use of the...