We present the timing and spectral properties of the transient Be/X-ray binary pulsar 3A 0535+262 during quiescence using three observations with the narrow field imaging instruments (NFI) of BeppoSAX. Assuming a distance of 2 kpc for this system, the 2–10 keV X-ray luminosities measured from the three observations are in the range of 1.5–4.0 × 10 33 erg s −1 , indicating a very low rate of acc...

The need for properly trained sterile processing staff members has grown with the increased sophistication of surgical procedures. In 1998, I conducted a survey of hospitals about various aspects of training sterile processing personnel, including the length of time for training employees to process general surgical and specialty surgical instruments. To evaluate trends, I conducted a second su...

Background Haemorrhoidectomy is frequently associated with significant postoperative pain and prolonged hospital stay; different techniques and devices have been developed to overcome these problems, including modifications of the technique (excision without legation) and introduction of new surgical instruments (LigasureTM, Harmonic ScalpelTM). We evaluated the surgical outcomes of Milligan Mo...

BACKGROUND Guidance on the cleaning of dental instruments in primary care has recently been published. The aims of this study are to determine if the publication of the guidance document was enough to influence decontamination best practice and to design an implementation intervention strategy, should it be required. METHODS A postal questionnaire assessing current decontamination practice an...

workspace analysis is one of the most important issues in the robotic parallel manipulator design. ‎however, ‎the unidirectional constraint imposed by cables causes this analysis more challenging in the cabledriven redundant parallel manipulators. controllable workspace is one of the general workspace in the cabledriven redundant parallel manipulators due to the dependency on geometry parameter...

We report performance verification observations of the giant elliptical galaxy M87 in the Virgo Cluster with the MOS, pn, and optical monitor instruments on board of XMM-Newton. With the energy sensitive imaging instruments MOS and pn we obtain the first spatially constrained X-ray spectra of the nucleus and the jet of the galaxy. The good photon statistics of the pn and MOS allow a detailed an...

surgical instruments, on bandaging and on many other aspects of surgery in general and surgery of the head and neck area in particular. It is hoped however that the present paper will stimulate interest and further examination of the empiric maturity of Hindu surgery more than fifteen centuries ago.

The study of two biological indicators in monitoring "flash" sterilization demonstrated that indicator construction often leads to a false interpretation of spore survival.

BACKGROUND Transferring non-trivial human manipulation skills to robot systems is a challenging task. There have been a number of attempts to design research systems for skill transfer, but the level of the complexity of the actual skills transferable to the robot was rather limited, and delicate operations requiring a high dexterity and long action sequences with many sub-operations were impos...