1124 NOTICES OF THE AMS VOLUME 45, NUMBER 9 I n the twentieth century, the quest for deeper understanding of the laws of nature has largely revolved around the development of two great theories: namely, general relativity and quantum mechanics. General relativity is, of course, Einstein’s theory according to which gravitation results from the curvature of space and time; the mathematical framew...

So picture the astonishment of British and Belgian scientists as they scanned her brain using a kind o MRI that detects blood flow to active parts of the brain. When they recited sentences, the parts involved in language lit up. When they asked her to imagine visiting the rooms of her house, the part involved in navigating space and recognizing places ramped up. And when they asked her to imagi...

Glueball candidates and qq̄ mesons have been found to be produced with different momentum and angular dependences in the central region of pp collisions. This talk illustrates this phenomenon and explains the φ and t dependences of mesons with JPC = 0±+, 1++, 2±+. For production of 0++ and 2++ mesons the analysis reveals a systematic behaviour in the data that appears to distinguish between qq̄ a...

Many of the most important breakthroughs in science do not come from hypothesis-driven experiments. Apart from serendipity, genetics is perhaps our best route to discoveries that elude our intuition. Genetics establishes a relationship between a gene and a phenotype, but does not necessarily provide mechanistic information. The emerging story of PCSK9 (originally called Narc-1) provides a case ...

Heroin overdose deaths in the Unites States more than tripled from 2010 to 2014, reaching almost 11,000 per year. Despite the use of the term “overdose,” many of these victims died after self-administering an amount of opiate that would not be expected to be fatal for these drug-experienced, and drug-tolerant, individuals. Various explanations of this overdose mystery have been proposed. I desc...

B efore the advent of HIV, which led to an increased awareness of Mycobacterium avium complex disease, followed by the first prospective comparison studies on treatment regimens [1, 2], the topic of nontuberculous mycobacterial disease was a true example of Aristotelian science. Previously, only a few experts worldwide had compiled empirical data and disseminated knowledge on the subject, which...

After outlining some of the issues surrounding the flavor problem, I present three speculative ideas on the origin of families. In turn, families are conjectured to arise from an underlying preon dynamics; from random dynamics at very short distances; or as a result of compactification in higher dimensional theories. Examples and limitations of each of these speculative scenarios are discussed....

For nearly 15 years, it has been widely believed that many introns were recently acquired by the genes of multicellular organisms. However, the mechanism of acquisition has yet to be described for a single animal intron. Here, we report a large-scale computational analysis of the human, Drosophila melanogaster, Caenorhabditis elegans, and Arabidopsis thaliana genomes. We divided 147,796 human i...

On examination he was sweaty and looked ill. The blood pressure was 140/90 mm Hg, heart rate 95 beats/ min, axillary temperature 38 ° C and respiratory rate 25/ min. The left hemithorax was dull to percussion and there were decreased breath sounds. The abdomen was found to be soft but tender with normal bowel sounds. Routine full blood counts and serum chemistry were normal, except for a raised...