Since twins weigh about 20% less than singletons at birth, maternal smoking may be a more severe risk for them than for singletons. Therefore, the effect of maternal smoking during pregnancy on birth weight was investigated in a group of 5376 twins. All necessary information was collected by a questionnaire filled out by the mother of the twins. Gestational age explains more than 75% of the var...

Aims The use of exotic species as taxon substitutes to restore lost ecological interactions is currently hotly debated. Aldabrachelys gigantea giant tortoises have recently been introduced to three islands in the Mascarene archipelago (Ile aux Aigrettes, Round Island and Rodrigues) to resurrect herbivory and seed dispersal functions once performed by extinct giant tortoises. However, potential ...

1. INTRODUCTION. A Hamiltonian cycle in a graph is a path in the graph which visits each vertex exactly once and returns to the starting vertex. Let í µí°¾ í µí±› be a weighted complete graph with í µí±› vertices. We define the weight of an edge as the square of the distance between two end points of the edge. The weight of a path í µí±ƒ is the sum of the weights of all edges in the path and de...