The Utiscreen-CORAL Biomedical system and ROBOBACT system were tested against conventional uroculture in blood agar and MacConkey agar as a reference method to determine the bacteriuria from 400 samples. For the Utiscreen-CORAL Biomedical system, a sensitivity of 92.5% was obtained. However, by the ROBOBACT system, the sensitivity was 69.9%.

We present new results on the structure of the solar core, obtained with new sets of frequencies of solar low-degree p modes obtained from the BiSON network. We find that different methods used in extracting the different sets of frequencies cause shifts in frequencies, but the shifts are not large enough to affect solar structure results. We find that the BiSON frequencies show that the solar ...

We study propagation failure using the one-dimensional scalar bistable equation with a passive “gap” region. By applying comparison principles for this type of equation, the problem of finding conditions for block is reduced to finding conditions for the existence of steady state solutions. We present a geometrical method that allows one to easily compute the critical gap length above which a s...

We examine the gravitational redshift of radiation emitted from within the potential of a cluster. Spectral lines from the intracluster medium (ICM) are redshifted in proportion to the emission-weighted mean potential along the line of sight, amounting to approximately 50 km s-1 at a radius of 100 kpc h-1, for a cluster dispersion of 1200 km s-1. We show that the relative redshifts of different...

A 5×5 board is the smallest board on which one can set up all kind of chess pieces as a start position. We consider Gardner’s minichess variant in which all pieces are set as in a standard chessboard (from Rook to King). This game has roughly 9 × 10 legal positions and is comparable in this respect with checkers. We weakly solve this game, that is we prove its game-theoretic value and give a st...

Digital information is accumulating at an astounding rate, straining our ability to store and archive it. DNA is among the most dense and stable information media known. The development of new technologies in both DNA synthesis and sequencing make DNA an increasingly feasible digital storage medium. We developed a strategy to encode arbitrary digital information in DNA, wrote a 5.27-megabit boo...

The visual perception of contours by the brain is selective. When embedded within a noisy background, closed contours are detected faster, and with higher certainty, than open contours. We investigate this phenomenon theoretically with the paradigmatic excitable FitzHughNagumo model, by considering a set of locally coupled oscillators subject to local uncorrelated noise. Noise is needed to over...

We propose a new method of volume hologram multiplexing/demultiplexing in noncentrosymmetric media. Volume holograms may be multiplexed by tuning the material parameters of the recording medium (such as refractive index or lattice parameters) while keeping the external parameters (wavelength and angles) fixed. For example, an external dc electric field alters the index of refraction through the...