BACKGROUND The microscopical diagnosis of male urethritis was recently questioned by Rietmeijer and Mettenbrink, lowering the diagnostic criteria of the diagnosis to ≥2 polymorphonuclear leucocytes (PMNL) per high power field (HPF), and adopted by Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in their 2015 STD Treatment Guidelines. The European Non-Gonococcal Urethritis Guideline advocates a limit...

Background: The microscopical diagnosis of male urethritis was recently questioned by Rietmeijer and Mettenbrink, lowering the diagnostic criteria of the diagnosis to ≥2 polymorphonuclear leucocytes (PMNL) per high power field (HPF), and adopted by Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in their 2015 STD Treatment Guidelines. The European Non-Gonococcal Urethritis Guideline advocates a limi...

Introduction Evolutionists and creationists have different views on the origin of sedimentary rock strata. Evolutionists, who uphold the uniformitarian doctrine of 19th century geologists, suppose that most sedimentary strata were deposited slowly over millions of years as the Earth evolved gradually to its present configuration. Creationists who uphold the catastrophist doctrine of Scripture p...

The Prairie Pothole Region (PPR) is the most important waterfowl production area in North America. However, waterfowl populations there are predicted to decline because of climate-related drying of wetlands. Consequently, changes in the geographic focus of PPR waterfowl conservation have been recommended, which could have long-lasting and costly impacts. We used a 40-year dataset of pond counts...

BACKGROUND The understanding of changes in temporal processes related to human carcinogenesis is limited. One approach for prospective functional genomic studies is to compile trajectories of differential expression of genes, based on measurements from many case-control pairs. We propose a new statistical method that does not assume any parametric shape for the gene trajectories. METHODS The ...

The visual system analyzes images through parallel channels, and our data suggest that the first set of parallel representations of the visual world is embodied in the inner plexiform layer (IPL) of the retina, in which light-evoked excitatory inputs of the ON and OFF bipolar cells to amacrine cells (ACs) are organized in a layer-by-layer manner. Approximately 30% of ACs have narrowly monostrat...

BACKGROUND The Gaining Optimal Asthma ControL (GOAL) study has shown the superiority of a combination of salmeterol/fluticasone propionate (SFC) compared with fluticasone propionate alone (FP) in terms of improving guideline defined asthma control. METHODS Clinical and economic data were taken from the GOAL study, supplemented with data on health related quality of life, in order to estimate ...

Phenomenological evidence suggests the existence of non-trivial background fields in the QCD vacuum. On the other hand SU(3) gauge theory possessses three different classes of both non-generic and non-trivial strata that may be used as classical backgrounds. It is suggested that this threefold multiplicity of non-trivial vacua may be related to the existence of particle generations, which would...