BACKGROUND Pioneers in natural orifice transvaginal cholecystectomy are in search of an approach that uses less percutaneous assistance. The approach must be safe and affordable. The authors present a successful cholecystectomy using a technique of transvaginal operative laparoscopy with no abdominal ports. METHODS A 24-year-old female patient with gallbladder lithiasis underwent a natural or...

An intrepid waitress leaves a restaurant kitchen with a stack of n different sized pancakes. Before she reaches her patrons, she wishes to iterate through all possible stack orderings using only a spatula and performing flips of various sizes. But is this possible? This problem corresponds to constructing a Hamilton path in the “pancake network”, or equivalently, to find a Gray code for permuta...

The healthy live fish Mugil cephalus were purchased from lower Anaikkat in Kollidam River, Thanjavur District. Tamilnadu, India. Mucus was carefully scraped from the dorsal body using a sterile spatula, the collected fish mucus was stored separately at 4 °C for further use. Anticancer activity was done by laryngeal cancer cell lines. Primarily the hemolytic activity was done in chicken and goat...

The hierarchical architecture of protective biological materials such as mineralized fish scales, gastropod shells, ram's horn, antlers, and turtle shells provides unique design principles with potentials for guiding the design of protective materials and systems in the future. Understanding the structure-property relationships for these material systems at the microscale and nanoscale where fa...

Wet adhesive systems of insects strongly rely for their function on the formation of capillary bridges with the substrate. Studies on the chemical composition and evaporation dynamics of tarsal secretions strongly suggest a difference in chemistry of secretion in beetles and flies, both possessing hairy attachment devices. This difference is assumed to influence the viscosity of the secretion. ...

Some time ago in another paper there was a symposium on the subject of which was the best operation for trichiasis. The contributors described many methods, but here in India where trichiasis is so common the operation performed by Anagnostakis has not received the attention which it deserves, so I wish to bring it before the attention of your readers. During the past three months I have perfor...

A 1-week-old infant was brought to a regional hospital with a history of recurrent seizures following lower abdominal septic skin infection. She was found to have neonatal tetanus, and a spatula test was positive. The tetanus infection was associated with a superficial skin infection, common in neonates. Treatment included sedatives (diazepam, chlorpromazine, phenobarbitone and morphine), muscl...

INTRODUCTION We report an unusual case of corneal lamellar injury caused by long bamboo splinters. CASE PRESENTATION A 70-year-old Japanese man visited our hospital with a bamboo injury. Slit lamp examination revealed that a bundle of bamboo splinters had deeply penetrated the corneal stroma of the right eye from the nasal limbus. The splinters were approximately 8 mm in length, but had not p...

The pancake problem is concerned with sorting a permutation (a stack of pancakes of different diameter) using only prefix reversals (spatula flips). Although the problem description belies simplicity, an exact formula for the maximum number of flips needed to sort $n$ pancakes has been elusive. In this paper we present a different approach to the pancake problem, as a word problem on the symmet...