Climate talks snarled up

Biodiversity worries over climate talks

could be used to force large and unquantified emission cuts on them in the future. Governments in both Europe and America are now softening their call for a global target of halving emissions by 2050, in an attempt to build a consensus around a less ambitious deal. Todd Stern, the US special envoy for climate change, hinted of the softening stance at a meeting in London last month. " Our view a...

Climate change talks stumble on

At the twelfth hour of the UN climate change meeting in Cancún last month, negotiators from more than 200 countries managed to prevent the collapse of the 20-year-old climatechange-negotiating process but otherwise achieved little in concrete new moves to build on the Kyoto protocol, a legal commitment to reduce carbon emissions by some industrialised countries, which expires next year. But the...

Plenary Talks

Invited Talks

In 2009, Peter Cameron introduced a common generalization of various classes of combinatorial designs such as balanced incomplete block designs, resolvable designs and orthogonal arrays. Generalized covering and packing designs can be defined in analogous way. These objects bring into this framework further classes of designs, including covering and packing arrays, Howell designs, monogamous cy...

Hour Talks

Efforts to detect targets of recent positive selection (“selective sweeps”) in the genome frequently involve an initial screen of a region of the genome at a low density of markers (either SNPs or microsatellites), followed by a denser screen in the region flanking markers that show reduced or skewed variation relative to that predicted by an equilibrium neutral model or relative to “background...