A pencil core with an intact pencil tip was excised from the thigh of a 60-year-old male 53 years after a puncture wound. Histologic examination of the excised pencil core and the surrounding tissue revealed a foreign body reaction with abundant entrapped dark black pigment and chronic reparative changes, including dense sclerosis and focal granulation tissue formation.

We describe the generic change of the partial multiplicities at a given eigenvalue λ0 of a regular matrix pencil A0 + λA1 under perturbations with low normal rank. More precisely, if the pencil A0 + λA1 has exactly g nonzero partial multiplicities at λ0, then for most perturbations B0 + λB1 with normal rank r < g the perturbed pencil A0 + B0 + λ(A1 + B1) has exactly g − r nonzero partial multip...

Article history: Received 28 December 2012 Available online 14 June 2013 Communicated by T.S. Ratiu MSC: 37K10 53D17 53A60 A Poisson pencil is called flat if all brackets of the pencil can be simultaneously locally brought to a constant form. Given a Poisson pencil on a 3-manifold, we study under which conditions it is flat. Since the works of Gelfand and Zakharevich, it is known that a pencil ...

Many students struggle with statistical concepts such as interaction. In an experimental group, participants took a paper-and-pencil test and then were given training to establish equivalent classes containing four different statistical interactions. All participants formed the equivalence classes and showed maintenance when probes contained novel negative exemplars. Thereafter, participants to...

Pencil core granuloma is characterized by a delayed foreign-body reaction against retained fragments of pencil lead. Previous case reports presented pencil core granuloma resembling malignant melanoma, haemangioma, or soft tissue sarcoma. We present a case of pencil core granuloma arising from the palm 25 years after the initial injury. The patient presented a bluish nodule that had been presen...

Mirror therapy is an effective technique for pain relief and motor function recovery. It has been demonstrated that magnetic 20-Hz activity is induced in the primary motor cortex (M1) after median nerve stimulation and that the amount of the stimulus-induced 20-Hz activity is decreased when the M1 is activated. In the present study, we investigated how the image or the mirror reflection of a ha...

We present three cases of intracorneal pencil graphite particles following penetrating ocular injury. Slit lamp examination revealed pencil graphite particles in the corneal stroma in all cases. Although we did not remove the particles, no complications occurred during the follow-up period. We assumed that removal of the pencil graphite particles was unnecessary, and it was avoided to prevent t...