Conductance-based equations for electrically active cells form one of the most widely studied mathematical frameworks in computational biology. This framework, as expressed through a set of differential equations by Hodgkin and Huxley, synthesizes the impact of ionic currents on a cell's voltage--and the highly nonlinear impact of that voltage back on the currents themselves--into the rapid pus...

Aldous Huxley wrote these words after being with his first wife as she died of cancer in 1955. During her final hours, he employed a hypnotic technique to remind her of spontaneous peak experiences she had known during her life, thereby seeking to guide her toward similar states of consciousness as the death process occurred. In his novel Island, he describes a similar scene during the death of...

Another recent surprise was the discovery of a phytoplankton bloom under the sea ice of the Arctic during investigations in the north Pacific led by Kevin Arrigo from Stanford University (Science (2012) 336, 1408). This, the authors conclude, could mean that productivity in the icy polar waters may have been underestimated by a factor of up to ten, which underlines that we still know far too li...

The Huxley whose name appears in the title of this article is not Thomas (Darwin’s ‘Bulldog’), but his grandson Julian, the author of Problems of Relative Growth [1], brother of the novelist Aldous (Brave New World) and half-brother of the biophysicist Andrew (the Hodgkin-Huxley equations). In 1924, Julian began studying the relative size of various organs and found many examples of what he cal...

The fetal-origins hypothesis, in its initial form, postulated that maternal and fetal undernutrition is associated with an increase in an individual’s propensity towards the development of CHD and its allied risk factors in adult life (Barker, 1993), including hypertension, dyslipidaemia and Type 2 diabetes. Indeed, an inverse association between birth weight and blood pressure has been conside...

in this paper, modified simple equation method has been applied to ob-tain generalized solutions of burgers, huxley equations and combined forms of these equations. the new exact solutions of these equations have been obtained. it has been shown that the proposed method provides a very effective, and powerful mathematical tool for solving nonlinear partial differential equations.

In writing this paper I hope to lessen the polarization of religious discourse by making space for agnosticism between atheism and religious faith. I do this by critiquing two arguments against agnosticism, one offered by a ““new atheists,”” Richard Dawkins, and the other offered by a defender of faith, William James. The new atheists are notable not only for the strident rhetorical attacks on ...

Many different types of voltage-dependent ion channels have been identified and are responsible for a rich repertoire of electrical behavior essential for neuronal function (Llinas, 1988). Modeling voltagedependent ion channels is crucial to assess their numerous roles in the genesis of the complex intrinsic properties of central neurons, as well as how such neurons integrate synaptic inputs wi...