Quasi-biennial cycles are often reported in climate studies. The interannual El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) and North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) are two phenomena containing quasi-periodicities of approximately 2.5 and 2.2 years. It is known that ENSO affects corn yield throughweather patterns, NAO affects surface temperature and cloudiness, and surface temperature, rainfall, and radiation...

BACKGROUND Although colorectal cancer (CRC) screening strategies are quite common in the United States, their systematic introduction in Europe has been delayed until the year 2008. To estimate endoscopic requirements of four different CRC screening strategies (annual and biennial fecal occult blood testing (FOBT), flexible sigmoidoscopy every 5 years, and colonoscopy every 10 years) in an aver...

The modulation of the vertical flux of kinetic energy to the stratosphere by the pressure-work effect at 100 mb is compared with variations in the hemispheric kinetic cnergy, the horizontal momentum and heat transports a t “low” latitudes, and the tropical zonal wind and temperature for the lower stratosphere. It is deduced that the variation of the vertical flux of geopotential is in phase wit...

The Asian Society of Gynecologic Oncology (ASGO) was founded in 2008 with the aim of scientific exchange and collaboration, provision of educational opportunities, deepening friendship between members and ultimately improving care of women with gynecological cancer in Asia [1]. ASGO has an important role as almost half of all gynecologic cancer deaths occur in Asia [2]. Asia itself is a diverse...

Modeling nonlinear vertical components of a GPS time series is critical to separating sources contributing to mass displacements. Improved vertical precision in GPS positioning at stations for velocity fields is key to resolving the mechanism of certain geophysical phenomena. In this paper, we use ensemble empirical mode decomposition (EEMD) to analyze the daily GPS time series at 89 continuous...

Rotavirus vaccines were introduced in the United States in 2006 and in the subsequent years have fundamentally altered seasonality and shifted disease from annual to biennial epidemics. We investigated whether season and year of birth have emerged as risk factors for rotavirus and affected vaccine performance. We constructed a retrospective birth cohort of US children <5 years using the 2001-20...

This issue of Journal of Applied Crystallography includes some highlights of the 11th Biennial Conference on High-Resolution X-ray Diffraction and Imaging (XTOP), held in St Petersburg in 2012.

A reciprocal chromosomal transposition was identified in several annual oilseed Brassica napus genotypes used as parents in crosses to biennial genotypes for genetic mapping studies. The transposition involved an exchange of interstitial homeologous regions on linkage groups N7 and N16, and its detection was made possible by the use of segregating populations of doubled haploid lines and codomi...