The established view regarding 'brain death' in medicine and medical ethics is that patients determined to be dead by neurological criteria are dead in terms of a biological conception of death, not a philosophical conception of personhood, a social construction or a legal fiction. Although such individuals show apparent signs of being alive, in reality they are (biologically) dead, though this...

A binary phylogenetic network may or may not be obtainable from a tree by the addition of directed edges (arcs) between tree arcs. Here, we establish a precise and easily tested criterion (based on "2-SAT") that efficiently determines whether or not any given network can be realized in this way. Moreover, the proof provides a polynomial-time algorithm for finding one or more trees (when they ex...

Dieting has developed a negative reputation among many researchers and health care professionals. However, 'dieting' can refer to a variety of behavioural patterns that are associated with different effects on eating and body weight. The wisdom of dieting depends on what kind of dieting is involved, who is doing it, and why. Thus, depending on what one means by the term, dieting can be quite ha...

Perhaps the ultimate hope for physicists is that we will one day discover what is jocularly referred to as a TOE, a “Theory of Everything”, an all-embracing and self-consistent physical theory that summarizes everything that there is to know about the workings of the physical world. Almost all physicists would undoubtedly agree that such a theory is still conspicuous with its absence, although ...

Despite the epidemiological insights from the Framingham Study1 in the early 1950s and the resulting significant advances in the diagnosis and management of coronary heart disease (CHD), it remains the leading cause of death in the United States. In part, this is because sudden cardiac death is the first presentation of CHD in 50% of men and 64% of women2,3 and, therefore, the only available st...