OBJECTIVES To determine whether minors can successfully purchase alcohol online and to examine age verification procedures at the points of order and delivery. DESIGN A cross-sectional study evaluated underage alcohol purchase attempts from 100 popular Internet vendors. SETTING The study was conducted at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, July 14-27, 2011. PARTICIPANTS Eight 18- t...

We investigated whether the physical castes of the dimorphic ant Pheidole pallidula (Nylander) (Hymenoptera: Formicidae), are involved in determining within-nest activities and how their social investment in everyday tasks is influenced by large changes in the colony's caste ratio. Although the large-headed majors are morphologically distinct from minors, they are similar in size, exhibit simil...

Adolescents who are actively requesting Huntington's predictive testing of their own accord pose a dilemma to those providing testing. In the absence of empirical evidence as regards the impact of genetic testing on minors, current policy and guidelines, based on the ethical principles of non-maleficence and respect for individual autonomy and confidentiality, generally exclude the testing of m...

Consider the vertex-edge incidence matrix of an arbitrary undirected, loopless graph. We completely determine the possible minors of such a matrix. These depend on the maximum number of vertex-disjoint odd cycles (i.e., the odd tulgeity) of the graph. The problem of determining this number is shown to be NP-hard. Turning to maximal minors, we determine the rank of the incidence matrix. This dep...

BACKGROUND On January 1, 2000, Texas began enforcement of a law that requires physicians to notify a parent of a minor child seeking an abortion at least 48 hours before the procedure. METHODS We assessed changes in the rates in Texas of abortions and births (events per 1000 age-specific population) before enforcement of the parental notification law (1998 to 1999) and after enforcement (2000...

Authoritative international guidelines stipulate that for minors to participate in research, consent must be obtained from their parents or guardians. Significant numbers of mature minors, particularly in low-income settings, are currently being ruled out of research participation because their parents are unavailable or refuse to provide consent despite the possibility that they might wish to ...

Allogeneic tissues transplanted to mice treated with CD4- and CD8-specific Abs are often accepted indefinitely due to the induction of immunologic tolerance. When transplantation tolerance was induced to grafts mismatched at multiple minor histocompatibility loci, Ag specificity was inferred because third party grafts, mismatched at the MHC, were rejected normally. However, some "third party" g...

MRI is used routinely in research with children to generate new knowledge about brain development. The detection of unexpected brain abnormalities (incidental findings; IFs) in these studies presents unique challenges. While key issues surrounding incidence and significance, duty of care, and burden of disclosure have been addressed substantially for adults, less empirical data and normative an...

The Graph Minors project of Robertson and Seymour uncovered a very deep structural theory of graphs. This theory had several important consequences, among others, the proof of Wagner’s Conjecture. While the whole theory, presented in a series of 23 very dense papers, is notoriously difficult to understand, it has to be emphasized that these papers introduced several elementary concepts and tool...

OBJECTIVE To determine the extent to which Chinese American and white minors differ in age of smoking initiation, and to determine the effect of acculturation on smoking initiation. DESIGN Cross-sectional telephone surveys. SETTING Stratified random samples of the state of California, United States. SUBJECTS 347 Chinese American and 10 129 white adolescents aged 12 through 17 years, from ...