Background: Aerococcus urinae has lately been acknowledged as a cause of infective endocarditis (IE) especially in older males with underlying urinary tract disorders. In this population, cardiac implanted electronical devices (CIED) are not uncommon, but despite the capacity of A. urinae to form biofilm in vitro, no cases of aerococcal CIED infections have been reported to date.Case Presentation:

Thrombocytopenia is common in patients with invasive bacterial infections. Bacteria can activate platelets, but it is unclear if this affects platelet count. The aim of this study was to examine whether bacteraemia with Staphylococcus aureus, which readily activate human platelets, was more likely to be complicated by thrombocytopenia than bacteraemia with Escherichia coli or Streptococcus pneumon

With climate change, coastal areas are faced with unprecedented sea level rise and flooding, raising questions as to how societies will choose to adapt. One option is to strengthen existing sea walls to maintain current land uses; however, scientists, policy-makers and conservationists increasingly see the benefits of managed realignment, which is a nature-based coastal adaptation that involves th

Designing high-rise buildings is a complex and challenging task involving several parameters and variables. Recently, there have been major attempts to design the overall form of these buildings based on optimization approaches. This paper introduces a multi-objective optimization framework based on Genetic Algorithm, namely Energy Efficient Form-finder (EEF), consisting of four main steps of Form

Background: A slight increase in revisions for infected joint arthroplasties has been observed in the Nordic countries since 2000 for which the reasons are unclear. However, in 2007 a Swedish study of the timing for prophylactic antibiotics in a random sample of knee arthroplasties found that only 57% of the patients had received the antibiotic during the optimal time interval 45-15 minutes before

In Responsibility From the Margins, David Shoemaker distinguishes three forms of responsibility: attributability, answerability, and accountability. The introduction of various normative competence requirements lends precision to the contrasts that Shoemaker draws between these forms of responsibility. I argue, however, that these competence requirements are less well motivated than Shoemaker supp

The strongest constraint on Vtb presently comes from the 3 × 3 unitarity of the CKM matrix, which fixes Vtb to be very close to one. If unitarity is relaxed, current information from top production at Tevatron still leaves open the possibility that Vtb is sizably smaller than one. In minimal extensions of the standard model with extra heavy quarks, the unitarity constraints are much weaker, and th

We present the latest developments of the MadGraph/MadEvent Monte Carlo event generator and several applications to hadron collider physics. In the current version events at the parton, hadron and detector level can be generated directly from a web interface, for arbitrary processes in the Standard Model and in several physics scenarios beyond it (HEFT, MSSM, 2HDM). The most important additions ar