BACKGROUND The increased number of trips and competitions scheduled in the international agonistic calendars meets commercial demands while acting as a source of stress for the athletes. A model, developed in biathlons to monitor the so-called competition load, revealed an upward trend over time. The aim of this study was to evaluate, in a 21-year period, the effects of the International Biathl...

We report on the focalization of Bogoliubov-de Gennes excitations of the nonlinear Schrödinger equation in the defocusing regime (Gross-Pitaevskii equation for repulsive Bose-Einstein condensates) with a spatially modulated periodic potential. Exploiting the modification of the dispersion relation induced by the modulation, we demonstrate the existence of localized structures of the Bogoliubov-...

Before traveling, tourists need to ensure that they will have a well-organized trip, which mainly involves a smooth flow of visits to different tourist attractions by themselves or following a pre-designed plan made by tourism service providers. The present study examined how the sequence of visiting tourist attractions influences tourist satisfaction at the expectation and experience levels. P...

Despite abundant anecdotal evidence that creativity is associated with living in foreign countries, there is currently little empirical evidence for this relationship. Five studies employing a multimethod approach systematically explored the link between living abroad and creativity. Using both individual and dyadic creativity tasks, Studies 1 and 2 provided initial demonstrations that time spe...

Astrobiology is a transdisciplinary field with extraordinary potential for the scientific community. As such, it is important to educate the community at large about the growing importance of this field to increase awareness and scientific content learning and expose potential future scientists. To this end, we propose the creation of a traveling museum exhibit that focuses exclusively on astro...

The work introduces a model for reciprocal connections in neural fields by a nonlocal feedback mechanism, while the neural field exhibits nonlocal interactions and intra-areal transmission delays. We study the speed of traveling fronts with respect to the transmission delay, the spatial feedback range, and the feedback delay for general axonal and feedback connectivity kernels. In addition, we ...

It is reported that when a light beam travels through a slab of left-handed medium in the air, the lateral shift of the transmitted beam can be negative as well as positive. The necessary condition for the lateral shift to be positive is given. The validity of the stationary-phase approach is demonstrated by numerical simulations for a Gaussian-shaped beam. A restriction to the slab's thickness...

In many wave systems, propagation of steadily traveling solitons or kinks is prohibited because of resonances with linear excitations. We show that wave systems with resonances may admit an infinite number of traveling solitons or kinks if the closest to the real axis singularities of a limiting asymptotic solution in the complex upper half plane are of the form z±=±α+iβ, α≠0. This quite genera...

A theoretical method is developed to treat wideband pulsed squeezing in a traveling-wave parametric amplifier with group-velocity dispersion. Classical stochastic wave equations that are fully equivalent to operator equations of motion are developed and solved numerically. It is found that squeezing occurs over the entire phase-matching bandwidth, although the degree of squeezing decreases when...