Staphylococcus aureus is one the top five pathogens causing domestically acquired foodborne illness in the U.S. Only a few studies are available related to the prevalence of S. aureus and MRSA in the U.S. retail poultry industry. The objectives of this study were to determine the prevalence of S. aureus (MSSA and MRSA) in retail chicken and turkey meats sold in Tulsa, Oklahoma and to characteri...

To the Editor: Two predominant community-associated methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (CAMRSA) clones have been reported in South America: 1) sequence type 30 staphylococcal cassette chromosome mec IV (ST30-SCCmec IV) (USA 1100), first found in Uruguay (2002) and later in Brazil and Argentina (2005); and 2) ST8SCCmec IVc/E (USA300–Latin American variant), found predominantly in Ecuado...

In 1932, Philip N. Panton and his colleagues, as they studied bacterial toxins at the London Hospital, could not have anticipated the scientific revolution coming in microbial genomics. It is ironic, then, that some of the genes encoding those toxins Panton and colleagues discovered well before the midpoint in the 20th century would now be contributing to our knowledge of how bacterial pathogen...

In November 2015 I announced the result that Graph Isomorphism can be tested in quasipolynomial time. The first version of the full paper was posted on arXiv in December 2015, and an updated version in January 2016 (arXiv:1512.03547). Below we refer to Version 2 (Jan 2016) of that paper as [Q2]. On January 1, 2017, Harald Helfgott pointed out an error in the timing analysis of one of the combin...

The study of the kinematics of globular clusters in the outer regions of the Large Magellanic Cloud by Schommer et al. [1] suggested a flat rotation curve, perhaps out to 15 kpc: the LMC might have a dark matter halo. Here, from a composite H i and star cluster rotation curve (fig. 1), I want to estimate the parameters of an isothermal halo added to a ‘maximum disk.’ Luks and Rohlfs [2], in the...

Conformal solution theory is examined. It is suggested that most difficulties associated with previous applications of this theory arise from the use of concentration-independent reference fluids. For the particular case of a hard-sphere mixture, it is shown that if the reference fluid is chosen so as to make the first-order term in the theory vanish, good results are obtained. When two species...

Inexact graph matching has become an important research area because it is used to find similarities among objects in several real domains such as chemical and biological compounds. Let G and G′ be input labeled graphs, we present an algorithm capable to find a graph S of G, where S is isomorphic to G′ and the corresponding labels between the vertices and edges of S and G′ are not the same (ine...

Our work focuses on various complexity measures for two-handed assembly sequences. For many products, there exist an exponentially large set of valid sequences, and a natural goal is to use automated systems to select wisely from the choices. Since assembly sequencing is a preprocessing phase for a long and expensive manufacturing process, any work towards nding a better assembly sequence is of...

20 Staphylococcus pseudintermedius is often associated with pyoderma, which can turn into a life21 threatening disease. The dissemination of highly resistant isolates has occurred in the last 10 22 years and has challenged antimicrobial treatment of these infections considerably. We have 23 compared the carriage of virulence genes and biofilm formation between methicillin-resistant 24 and methi...

Judgments of agency refer to people’s self-reflective assessments concerning their own control: their assessments of the extent to which they themselves are responsible for an action. These self-reflective metacognitive judgments can be distinguished from action monitoring, which involves the detection of the divergence (or lack of divergence) between observed states and expected states. Presum...