As the name indicates, a renewal process is one that “renews” itself regularly. That is, there is a sequence of times {Tn, n ∈ Z} such that the process after time Tn is independent of what happened before that time and has a distribution that does not depend on n. We have seen examples of such processes before. As a simple example, one could consider a Poisson process with jump times Tn. As ano...

Thomas Browne was born in 1605. His father was a London merchant about whom little is known. His mother married a second time and Thomas's stepfather, Sit Thomas Dutton, gave him an excellent education, first at Winchester and then at Bradgate Hall, now Pembroke College, Oxford. His undergraduate career was distinguished and he acquired a BA in 1626, followed by a MA in 1629. After a visit to I...

Widdowson, E. M., Crabb, D. E., and Milner, R. D. G. (1972). Archives of Disease in Childhood, 47, 652. Cellular development of some human organs before birth. The total amount of DNA and the protein/DNA ratio have been measured in the kidneys, heart, liver, and gastrocnemius muscles of 56 human fetuses and newborn infants of 13-42 weeks' gestational age. The total amount of DNA in each organ a...

Chronic viraemia has been detected in 10 out of 12 rubella syndrome babies at periods ranging from 1 to 196 days. The virus was found to be associated with leucocytes, and it is assumed that removal of neutralizing antibody is the most likely explanation for the high success rate in detecting viraemia. The findings are discussed in relation to diagnosis by virus isolation, to pathogenesis, and ...

Nevertheless, women in such areas again become highly vulnerable to infection by P. falciparum parasites when they get pregnant, especially during a first pregnancy. This pregnancy-associated reappearance of susceptibility is related to the ability of the parasites to escape preexisting clinical immunity by expressing particular pregnancy-specific antigens on the surface of infected erythrocyte...

There is a well-documented reduction in endometrial cancer risk with combined oral contraceptive (COC) use. COC use before the first full-term pregnancy may affect breast cancer risk for decades, but this relationship has not been investigated in endometrial cancer. We investigated the risk for endometrial cancer with COC use before the first full-term pregnancy. Cases (n = 524) from a populati...

Preterm infants are at increased risk for serious, lifelong neurologic abnormalities such as cerebral palsy.1,2 As the survival of preterm infants has improved with advances in perinatal care,2 the occurrence of cerebral palsy has increased further, since infants who would previously have died now survive with their cerebral pathology. Currently, more than 30% of children with cerebral palsy ar...

Learning, the foundation of adaptive and intelligent behavior, is based on plastic changes in neural assemblies, reflected by the modulation of electric brain responses. In infancy, auditory learning implicates the formation and strengthening of neural long-term memory traces, improving discrimination skills, in particular those forming the prerequisites for speech perception and understanding....

The purpose of this study was to see if lung vascular protein permeability is greater in preterm lambs with respiratory distress than it is in lambs without lung disease. We measured pulmonary vascular pressures, lung lymph flow, and concentrations of protein in lymph and plasma of 10 chronically catheterized preterm lambs (gestation 133 +/- 1 d) for 2-4 h before and for 4-8 h after delivery by...