Plant-pathogen interactions: what is proteomics telling us?

What is the gonococcus telling us?

Impact of improved treatment of sexually transmitted diseases on HIV infection in rural Tanzania: randomised controlled trial. Australian gonococcal surveillance programme. Use of a quality assurance scheme in a long-term multicentric study of antibiotic susceptibility of Neisseria gonorrhoeae. Biologically and politically the gonococcus could hardly be more different from the human immunodefic...

Plant Immunity and Film Noir What Gumshoe Detectives Can Teach Us about Plant-Pathogen Interactions

Plant cells practice constant vigilance using resistance (R) proteins to monitor pathogenic processes. Three papers published recently in Cell and one in Science provide support for a model in which plant cells set up surveillance of signal transduction pathways, preparing to destroy the cell if any untoward fiddling with cellular physiology is detected. The demonstration of three separate exam...

What else is the evolution of PSO telling us?

Evolutionary Algorithms (EAs) can be used in order to design Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) algorithms that work, in some cases, considerably better than the human-designed ones. By analyzing the evolutionary process of designing PSO algorithms, we can identify different swarm phenomena (such as patterns or rules) that can give us deep insights about the swarm’s behaviour. The rules that hav...

PERFLUOROALKYL ACIDS: What Is the Evidence Telling Us?

What is the homogeneity of our universe telling us?

The universe we observe is homogeneous on super-horizon scales, leading to the “cosmic homogeneity problem”. Inflation alleviates this problem but cannot solve it within the realm of conservative extrapolations of classical physics. A probabilistic solution of the problem is possible but is subject to interpretational difficulties. A genuine deterministic solution of the homogeneity problem req...