CRD summary The review found the vaginoscopic approach to outpatient hysteroscopy significantly reduced the pain experienced by patients during the procedure compared to the traditional technique using a vaginal speculum and with no significant difference for visualising the uterine cavity. The review was generally well-performed. Limitations to the evidence presented imply that the authors' co...

The blue colours of the speculum of the mallard (Anas platyrhynchos), both male and female, and the green head feathers of the male arise from light interacting with stacks of melanosomes residing in the feather barbules. Here, we show that the iridescent colours can be quantitatively explained with an optical multilayer model by using a position-dependent effective refractive index, which resu...

Pseudo-Ovid is one of the more prolific authors of the high Middle Ages. Put differently, the Roman poet Ovid was liked so much that he was often imitated by authors whose names we do not know, but who were successful enough in their efforts to be judged worthy of being transmitted with the genuine poems of Ovid. In some instances, it was not before the nineteenth or even the twentieth century ...

Jerome wrote Epistula prima probably during the decade of 366–376. Little is known about this stage in his life, but it was apparently then that as a young man he became interested asceticism and at end period time finally decided to become monk. However, ascetic ideas are not main theme Ep. 1. The letter tells story falsely accused woman who subjected torture survived seven strokes executioner...

The subject of this paper is the story of an ancient medical instrument. This instrument is a wooden vaginal speculum used in classical and Islamic medicine. Its drawings can be found in Abulcasis al-Zahrawi's and Şerefeddin Sabuncuoğlu's illustrated books of surgery.

Wood distillate (WD) is an environmentally safe bio-based product stimulating plant growth and yield allowed in Italy organic farming. To the best of our knowledge, there are no studies on effects WD spontaneous plants growing among crops, including their functional traits such as biomass. test effects, we carried out a lab experiment artificially reconstructed arable communities composed five ...