BACKGROUND An increased incidence of sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS) at weekends has been previously noted, although it has not been found in all studies. Where a weekend effect has been found it is most prominent on Sundays. AIM To identify the magnitude of this effect in British data before and after the fall in prevalence associated with the "back to sleep" campaign. METHODS Aggregat...

Application of a fluorescence technique for the detection of the human Y chromosome in interphase nuclei indicates that the best results may be obtained from the study of lymphocytes in blood smears. The most satisfactory Y-fluorescence is obtained with the use of buffered quinacrine mustard dihydrochloride. The method can be complemented by other standard techniques to obtain a clear idea of t...

Rather than using length-based or translation-based criterion to align bilingual texts, this paper proposes a part-of-speech-based (POS-based) criterion. The postulation is that bilingual texts should share the same concepts, ideas, entities and events. In addition, these are usually represented by some critical POSes. Thus, the numbers of critical POSes in a language pair of a bead are close. ...

Rates of spontaneous mutation have been estimated under optimal growth conditions for a variety of DNA-based microbes, including viruses, bacteria, and eukaryotes. When expressed as genomic mutation rates, most of the values were in the vicinity of 0.003-0.004 with a range of less than two-fold. Because the genome sizes varied by roughly 10(4)-fold, the mutation rates per average base pair vari...

See related article, p XXX Physicists, politicians, poets, and punters understand the pitfalls of predicting the future. Similarly, predicting outcomes after stroke rehabilitation can be difficult when based on clinical impression, and several approaches to combining key variables in predictive models have been developed. In this issue, Scrutinio et al introduce a predictive model of functional...

Neurocognitive impairment is frequent in epilepsy patients. Causes are multiple, and may be influenced by several factors including the epilepsy syndrome. Most cognitive complaints in adult patients are mental slowness, memory difficulties and attention deficits. In children, cognitive problems are more diffuse, responsible for language troubles, learning difficulties, poor academic outcome, be...

Atherosclerosis and ensuing cardiovascular disease (CVD) are major complications of diabetes type 2. Atherosclerosis is a chronic inflammatory condition involving immunocompetent cells of different types present in the lesions. Even though inflammation and immune activation may be more pronounced in atherosclerosis in diabetes type 2, there does not appear to be any major differences between di...

I am writing this column in early December, prior to the IEEE Conference on Decision and Control (CDC) in Florence, but after the IEEE Technical Activity Board (TAB) meeting in New Jersey and the IEEE Control Systems Society (CSS) Executive Committee meeting that was held in Stutt-gart. Amid all this travel, I have been contemplating reoccurring themes at the TAB and CSS meetings, both this yea...