Four cases of malignant melanoma arising in the vagina are described, and the literature related to this unusual tumor is reviewed. The 2-year survival rate is better following radical surgery than after other treatment modalities; however, the 5-year survival rate is unrelated to type of therapy. Radical surgery appears to control local disease, but fails to address systemic spread of the tumo...

We demonstrate experimentally, for the first time to our knowledge, a reconstruction of a highly reflecting fiber Bragg grating from its complex reflection spectrum by using a regularization algorithm. The regularization method is based on correcting the measured reflection spectrum at the Bragg zone frequencies and enables the reconstruction of the grating profile using the integral-layer-peel...

We demonstrate that E×B shear, V_{E×B}^{'}, governs the dynamics of the cross phase of the peeling-ballooning-(PB-)mode-driven heat flux, and so determines the evolution from the edge-localized (ELMy) H mode to the quiescent (Q) H mode. A physics-based scaling of the critical E×B shearing rate (V_{E×B,cr}^{'}) for accessing the QH mode is predicted. The ELMy H mode to the QH-mode evolution is s...

In the far-away homeland of Transkei there is poverty, malnutrition, and only the beginnings of economic development. But there is also a spar of hope and realism: its name is Kwazup -from kwa zondle uphile, which literally translated means "to feed yourself to be healthy." On a landscape of rondavels, mealie fields, and grazing cattle, where families struggle in the wet season to grow enough f...

We present a noise free and deterministic dynamic model to study the dynamics of the contact line of an adhesive tape during peeling process. The adhesive tape is wrapped around a disk and is pulled with a constant speed at a xed distance. In a narrow range of the pull speed, the angular speed of the contact line exhibits stick-slip behaviors with irregular bifurcations, which is then followed ...

Thin adhesive films have become increasingly important in applications involving packaging, coating or for advertising. Once a film is adhered to a substrate, flaps can be detached by tearing and peeling, but they narrow and collapse in pointy shapes. Similar geometries are observed when peeling ultrathin films grown or deposited on a solid substrate, or skinning the natural protective cover of...

An approach to reconstruct a quasi-phase-matching grating by using a discrete layer-peeling algorithm is presented. Experimentally measured output spectra of Šolc-type filters, based on uniform and chirped QPM structures, are used in the discrete layer-peeling algorithm. The reconstructed QPM structures are in agreement with the exact structures used in the experiment and the method is verified...

Behavioural risk factors such as tobacco smoking contribute significantly to the global and local disease burden. This article surveys three behavioural science interventions that could reduce rates of tobacco smoking in South Africa.