STUDY QUESTION The 16th European IVF-monitoring (EIM) report presents the data of the treatments involving assisted reproductive technology (ART) and intrauterine insemination (IUI) initiated in Europe during 2012: are there any changes compared with previous years? SUMMARY ANSWER Despite some fluctuations in the number of countries reporting data, the overall number of ART cycles has continu...

The establishment of parasites with complex life cycles is generally thought to be regulated by free-living species richness and the stability of local ecological interactions. In this study, we test the prediction that stable host communities are prerequisite for the establishment of complex multi-host parasite life cycles. The colonization of naïve killifish, Fundulus heteroclitus, by parasit...

Detection of sedimentary cycles is difficult in fine-grained or homogenous sediments but is a prerequisite for the interpretation of depositional environments. Here we use a new autocorrelation analysis to detect cycles in a homogenous sediment core, E602, from the northern shelf of the South China Sea. Autocorrelation coefficients were calculated for different mean grain sizes at various depth...

We report a potential way to enhance and tune the multiferroic and resistive switching properties of BiFeO3 nanoparticles through dilute aliovalent Li(1+) doping (0.046 atomic percent) at the Fe(3+) sites of BiFeO3. The high purity of the samples and the extent of doping were confirmed by different physical characterizations. Enhanced multiferroic properties with a magnetic moment per Fe atom ≈...

This paper studies the effect of thermal treatment on the long-term performance of carbon-based supercapacitors. Two active electrode materials were studied: a mesophase derived activated carbon (AC), rich in oxygen functionalities, and an activated carbon obtained from treating AC at 1000 °C (AC-1000), from which most of the functionalities had been removed. Up to 10,000 cycles were performed ...

Laser magnetic resonance spectroscopy (LMRS) is a sensitive and isotope-selective technique for determining low concentrations of gaseous free radicals with high time resolution. We used this technique to analyze the nitric oxide (NO) concentration profile while simultaneously measuring the flow and expired volume during several single breathing cycles. Eight healthy, nonallergic volunteers wer...

The study of supersymmetry breaking configurations in string theory has been a topic of significant interest during the past year. Many of these constructions have focused on stringy realizations of ISS type vacua in supersymmetric gauge theories. Another interesting class of examples has recently emerged, though, which admit no effective gauge theory description and therefore are, in a sense, ...

Random Boolean networks (RBNs) were proposed as a model of genetic regulatory networks by Kauffman in 1969. This paper addresses the stability of cycles of RBNs and Boolean networks. In particular we define the error probabilities of cycle states as the probability of leaving a cycle after a randomly occurring error. Therefore, we introduce the weight distributions, which are usually used to an...

In this paper we study a planar piecewise linear differential system formed by two regions separated by a straight line so that one system has a real unstable focus and the other a virtual stable focus which coincides with the real one. This system was introduced in a very recent paper (On the number of limit cycles in general planar piecewise linear systems, Discrete and Continuous Dynamical S...

We study a system of delay-differential equations modeling single-lane road traffic. The cars move in a closed circuit and the system's variables are each car's velocity and the distance to the car ahead. For low and high values of traffic density the system has a stable equilibrium solution, corresponding to the uniform flow. Gradually decreasing the density from high to intermediate values we...