A medium for the isolation and enumeration of Malassezia furfur is described. Incubation at 34 degrees C yielded geometric mean counts (in CFU per square centimeter) of 2.6 X 10(3) on the forehead, 8.5 X 10(2) on the cheek, and 9.6 X 10(3) on the back. These counts compared favorably with microscopic counts and greatly exceeded those obtained with previously described media.

Organ transplantation is an expensive, life-saving technology. Previous studies have found that few transplant recipients in the United States lack health insurance (in part because patients may become eligible for special coverage because of their disability and transplant teams vigorously advocate for their patients). Few data are available on the insurance status of U.S. organ donors. The au...

Tumor spheroids are increasingly recognized as an important in vitro model for the behavior of tumor cells in three dimensions. More physiologically relevant than conventional adherent-sheet cultures, they more accurately recapitulate the complexity and interactions present in real tumors. In order to harness this model to better assess tumor biology, or the efficacy of novel therapeutic agents...

We describe monocrystalline graphitic films, which are a few atoms thick but are nonetheless stable under ambient conditions, metallic, and of remarkably high quality. The films are found to be a two-dimensional semimetal with a tiny overlap between valence and conductance bands, and they exhibit a strong ambipolar electric field effect such that electrons and holes in concentrations up to 10(1...

IMPORTANCE No consensus exists regarding the definition of high-risk surgery in older adults. An inclusive and precise definition of high-risk surgery may be useful for surgeons, patients, researchers, and hospitals. OBJECTIVE To develop a list of high-risk operations. DESIGN, SETTING, AND PARTICIPANTS Retrospective cohort study and modified Delphi procedure. The setting included all Pennsy...

The overall goal of MENELAS is to provide better access to the information contained in natural language patient discharge summaries, through the design and implementation of a pilot system able to access medical reports through natural languages. A first, experimental version of the MENELAS indexing prototype for French has been assembled. Its function is to encode free text PDSs into both an ...

A writer independent handwriting recognition system must be able to recognize a wide variety of handwriting styles, while attempting to obtain a high degree of recognition accuracy. As the number of writing styles increases, so does the variability of data distribution. We describe here a template-based system using a string matching distance measure of linear time complexity for the recognitio...

The purpose of this article is to provide, with the help of a fluctuation identity, a generic link between a number of known identities for the first passage time and overshoot above/below a fixed level of a Lévy process and the solution of Gerber and Shiu [Astin Bull. 24 (1994) 195–220], Boyarchenko and Levendorskǐi [Working paper series EERS 98/02 (1998), Unpublished manuscript (1999), SIAM J...

Ir. 1800, James Potts of London produced an artificial leg with an articulated knee and ankle, and the ankle even had a 'toe lift' during the swing phase. The leg acquired fame by being provided for the Marquis of Anglesea, who had an above-knee amputation at the battle of Waterloo in 1815. The limb bears a remarkable resemblance to those produced today. Verduin, in 1696 produced a below-knee l...

Christiaan Huygens proved in 1659 that a particle sliding smoothly (under uniform gravity) on a cycloid with axis vertically down reaches the base in a period independent of the starting point. He built very accurate pendulum clocks, with cycloidal pendulums. Mark Denny has constructed another curve purported to give descent to the base in a period independent of the starting point; but the cyc...