Immune infertility, in terms of reproductive failure, has become a serious health issue involving approximately 1 out of 5 couples at reproductive age. Semen that is defined as a complex fluid containing sperm, cellular vesicles and other cells and components, could sensitize the female genital tract. The immune rejection of male semen in the female reproductive tract is explained as the failur...

Population dynamics predicts that on average parents should invest equally in male and female offspring; similarly, the physiology of mammalian sex determination is supposedly stochastic, producing equal numbers of sons and daughters. However, a high quality parent can maximize fitness by biasing their birth sex ratio (SR) to the sex with the greatest potential to disproportionately outperform ...

INTRODUCTION The relationship between admission time and intensive care unit (ICU) mortality is inconclusive and influenced by various factors. This study aims to estimate the effect of admission time on ICU outcomes in a tertiary teaching hospital in China by propensity score matching (PSM) and stratified analysis. METHODS A total of 2,891 consecutive patients were enrolled in this study fro...

Hatching asynchrony in avian species generally leads to a size hierarchy among siblings, favouring the first-hatched chicks. Maternally deposited hormones affect the embryo and chick's physiology and behaviour. It has been observed that progesterone, a hormone present at higher levels than other steroid hormones in egg yolks, is negatively related to body mass in embryos, chicks and adults. A d...

The upper limit of frequency sensitivity for vibrotactile stimulation of the fingers and hand is commonly accepted as 1 kHz. However, during the course of our research to develop a full-hand vibrotactile musical communication device for the hearing impaired, we repeatedly found evidence suggesting sensitivity to higher frequencies. Most of the studies on which vibrotactile sensitivity are based...

Although previous investigations of transsexual people have focused on regional brain alterations, evaluations on a network level, especially those structural in nature, are largely missing. Therefore, we investigated the structural connectome of 23 female-to-male (FtM) and 21 male-to-female (MtF) transgender patients before hormone therapy as compared with 25 female and 25 male healthy control...

Photoreceptor noise sets an absolute limit for the accuracy of colour discrimination. We compared colour thresholds in the honeybee (Apis mellifera) with this limit. Bees were trained to discriminate an achromatic stimulus from monochromatic lights of various wavelengths as a function of their intensity. Signal-to-noise ratios were measured by intracellular recordings in the three spectral type...

Introduction: Vessel-encoded pseudo-continuous arterial spin labelling (VEPCASL) can trace the blood from individual arteries in the brain. VEPCASL produces an approximately sinusoidal variation in inversion efficiency across space; specific combinations of arteries can be tagged, or encoded. Combining information from a number of different encodings allows perfusion territories or the brain va...

Greige cotton contains waxes and pectin on the outer surface of the fiber that are removed when bleached, but these components present potential wound dressing functionality. Cotton nonwovens blended with hydrophobic and hydrophilic fibers including viscose, polyester, and polypropylene were assessed for clotting activity with thromboelastography (TEG) and thrombin production. Clotting was eval...