Few reports provide pregnancy or birth rates for large groups of infertile couples having a comprehensive range of treatments. This model utilizes published evidence about diagnosis, treatment, the duration of treatment and the proportion of couples receiving treatment. Assisted reproduction technology treatment (ART) utilization was set arbitrarily at three levels: 3, 10 or 50% of the couples ...

In this letter we will revise the steps followed by A. Einstein when he first wrote on cosmology from the point of view of the general theory of relativity. We will argue that his insightful line of thought leading to the introduction of the cosmological constant in the equations of motion has only one weakness: The constancy of the cosmological term, or what is the same, its independence of th...

232 WMJ • DECEMBER 2014 medication in the past month increased from 43% to 48% during the last decade; the proportion of those using at least 5 prescription medications increased from 6% to 11%, and 53% of women and 43% men used at least 1 prescription medication in the past month.1 Prescription drug spending was estimated at $234.1 billion in 2008, more than double the spending in 1999.1 The r...

In last month’s newsletter, I discussed the adverse effects of the chemical compound fluoride on the brain and cognition. This article furthers that discussion and covers the physiological impact of fluoride, found in most community drinking water, on other body systems. Research has shown that fluoride intake negatively affects numerous organs and physiological processes, including the bones, ...

Iodine deficiency is a factor that may compromise child development, but is not the only one. Other health determinants, some of them outside the healthcare system, are able to influence development. Fighting iodine deficiency may be a pragmatic and useful strategy if it is found to be not maleficent, beneficial to health, and cost-effective, and does not make us lose the notion that child deve...

Explosibility and ignitability studies of air/cork dust mixtures were conducted in a near-spherical 22.7 L explosibility test chamber using pyrotechnic ignitors and in a furnace of 1.23 L. The suspension dust burned as air-dispersed dust clouds and the uniformity of the dispersion inside the chamber was evaluated through optical dust probes. The range of tested particle sizes went from a mass m...

Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) is a technique for measuring the efficiency of a set of Decision Making Units (DMUs) with common data, but in general it is not practical. This paper presents a framework where DEA is used to measure overall profit efficiency with fuzzy data. Specifically, it is shown that as the inputs, outputs and price vectors are fuzzy numbers, the DMUs cannot be easily evalu...

Two overall neutral surfaces with positively and negatively charged domains ("patches") have been shown in recent experiments to exhibit long-range attraction when immersed in an ionic solution. Motivated by the experiments, we calculate analytically the osmotic pressure between such surfaces within the Poisson-Boltzmann framework, using a variational principle for the surface-averaged free ene...