Three stochastic processes, the birth, death and birth-death processes, subject to immigration can be decomposed into the sum of each process in the absence of immigration and anindependent process. We examine these independent processes through their probability generating functions (pgfs) and derive their expectations.

The Belgian data for foodborne norovirus (NoV) outbreaks became available for the first time with the introduction of an extraction and detection protocol for NoV in the National Reference Laboratory for foodborne outbreaks in September 2006. In 2007, 10 NoV foodborne outbreaks were reported affecting 392 persons in Belgium. NoV became the most detected agent in foodborne outbreaks followed by Salmonella (eight foodborne outbreaks). The major implicated foods were sandwiches (4/10), where food handlers reported a history of gastroenteritis in two outbreaks. A food handler was implicated in the limited number of Belgian NoV outbreaks which is in accord with internationally recorded data. Forty foodborne and waterborne outbreak events due to NoV, epidemiological and/or laboratory confirmed, from 2000 to 2007 revealed that in 42·5% of the cases the food handler was responsible for the outbreak, followed by water (27·5%), bivalve shellfish (17·5%) and raspberries (10·0%).

The excretion of extracellular polymeric substances (EPS) by an axenic culture of the benthic diatom Cylindrotheca closterium was investigated. Two sequential extraction steps proved to be sufficient to remove the bulk of the EPS present. Soluble EPS was recovered by a simple centrifugation step and represented a fraction that was not or was only loosely associated with diatom cells. For the extraction of bound EPS, different procedures were compared. The best results were obtained using distilled water as extraction solvent (1 h, 30 °C). The sugars that were recovered using this procedure were typically associated with aggregates of diatoms. In addition to the distinct differences in localization of the different types of EPS, their temporal dynamics differed in relation to the light–dark cycle. Soluble EPS were continuously released into the medium at a rate of 1·6 pg cell−1 day−1. In contrast, the production of bound EPS was highly light-dependent. In the dark, this bound EPS rapidly disappeared, probably as the result of its utilization by the diatoms.

The fretting wear of sulphur-deficient MoSx coatings with different crystallographic orientations has been investigated in ambient air of controlled relative humidity. The coefficient of friction and the wear rate of MoSx coatings sliding against corundum depend not only on fretting parameters like contact stress, fretting frequency, and relative humidity, but also strongly on the crystallographic orientation of the coatings. For randomly oriented MoSx coatings, the coefficient of friction and the wear rate increased significantly with increasing relative humidity. In contrast, basal-oriented MoSx coatings were less sensitive to relative humidity. The coefficient of friction of both types of MoSx coatings decreased on sliding against corundum with increasing contact stress and decreasing fretting frequency. A correlation between dissipated energy and wear volume is proposed. This approach allows detection in a simple way of differences in fretting wear resistance between random- and basal-oriented MoSx coatings tested in ambient air of different relative humidity.

N2 fixation, measured as acetylene reduction, was studied in laboratory cultures and in natural assemblages (both as a mixed population and as individually picked colonies) of the heterocystous cyanobacteria Aphanizomenon sp. and Nodularia spp. from the Baltic Sea. During a diurnal cycle of alternating light and darkness, these organisms reduced acetylene predominantly during the period of illumination, although considerable activity was also observed during the dark period. In both laboratory cultures and natural populations N2 fixation was saturated below a photon flux density of 600 μm−2 s−1. In cyanobacterial blooms in the Baltic Sea, nitrogenase activity was mostly confined to the surface layers. Samples collected from greater depths did not possess the same capacity for acetylene reduction as samples from the surface itself, even when incubated at the photon flux density prevailing in surface waters. This suggests that, with respect to N2 fixation, Baltic cyanobacteria are adapted to the intensity of illumination that they are currently experiencing.

A model for the texture evolution of a growing film was developed, where the tendency for the lowest possible surface energy was taken as the driving force. Two main directions were considered in the orientation distribution of the columns. An initially isotropic distribution was found to evolve to a bimodal one and finally to a distribution with a sharp peak around the orientation with the smallest surface energy. For specific initial conditions the texture turns over from one orientation to the other one. The calculated textures showed a continuous sharpening around orientations with a local or absolute minimum in the surface energy. Various calculated phenomena concerning the texture evolution could be observed on PVD deposited TiN coatings.