OBJECTIVE To evaluate the impact of second semen analysis (SA) on a treatment decision in infertile men with varicocele and abnormal first SA. DESIGN Retrospective chart review. SETTING University hospital. INTERVENTION None. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURE(S) Standard clinical semen analysis. PATIENT(S) A total of 160 infertile men with varicocele and abnormal first SA were evaluated. Two SA we...

A saturable absorber is a nonlinear functional material widely used in laser and photonic nanodevices. Metallic nanostructures have prominent saturable absorption (SA) at the plasmon resonance frequency owing to largely enhanced ground state absorption. However, the SA of plasmonic metal nanostructures is hampered by excited-state absorption processes at very high excitation power, which usuall...

To improve inferences about psychological and social evidence contained in pictures and texts, a five-step algorithm-Systematic Analysis (SA)-was devised. It combines basic principles of interpretation in forensic science, providing a comprehensive record of signs of evidence. Criminal justice professionals evaluated the usefulness of SA. Effects of applying SA were tested experimentally with 4...

A novel mineral-based composite phase change materials (PCMs) was prepared via vacuum impregnation method assisted with microwave-acid treatment of the graphite (G) and bentonite (B) mixture. Graphite and microwave-acid treated bentonite mixture (GBm) had more loading capacity and higher crystallinity of stearic acid (SA) in the SA/GBm composite. The SA/GBm composite showed an enhanced thermal ...

We created an algorithm that allows high-throughput mapping of sense-antisense (SA) pairs of transcripts. By this method we mapped approximately 32 000 SA pairs of human mRNAs. Collected SA pairs were divided into three groups: SA pairs based on two or more UniGene clusters (17% of all sense-antisense pairs), SA pairs based on ESTs that belong to the same UniGene cluster (42%), and SA pairs for...

BACKGROUND Sickness absence (SA) is a public health risk marker for morbidity and mortality. The aim of this study was to develop and validate prediction models to identify employees at risk of high SA. METHODS Two prediction models were developed using self-rated health (SRH) and prior SA as predictors. SRH was measured by the categories excellent, good, fair and poor in a convenience sample...

Salicylic acid (SA) is a phenolic metabolite produced by plants and is known to play an important role in several physiological processes, such as the induction of plant defense responses against pathogen attack. Here, using the Arabidopsis thaliana-Pseudomonas aeruginosa pathosystem, we provide evidence that SA acts directly on the pathogen, down regulating fitness and virulence factor product...

The strong specific binding of streptavidin (SA) to biotin is utilized in numerous biotechnological applications. The SA tetramer is also known to exhibit significant stability, even in the presence of sodium dodecylsulfate (SDS). Despite its importance, relatively little is known about the nature of the thermal denaturation pathway for SA. This work uses a homogeneous SA preparation to expand ...

In this paper we study new stochastic approximation (SA) type algorithms, namely, the accelerated SA (AC-SA), for solving strongly convex stochastic composite optimization (SCO) problems. Specifically, by introducing a domain shrinking procedure, we significantly improve the large-deviation results associated with the convergence rate of a nearly optimal AC-SA algorithm presented in [4]. Moreov...