The loosely defined terms hard fork and soft fork have established themselves as descriptors of different classes of upgrade mechanisms for the underlying consensus rules of (proof-of-work) blockchains. Recently, a novel approach termed velvet fork, which expands upon the concept of a soft fork, was outlined in [22]. Specifically, velvet forks intend to avoid the possibility of disagreement by ...

Embryonic stem cells (ESCs) represent a transient biological state, where pluripotency is coupled with fast proliferation. ESCs display a constitutively active DNA damage response (DDR), but its molecular determinants have remained elusive. Here we show in cultured ESCs and mouse embryos that H2AX phosphorylation is dependent on Ataxia telangiectasia and Rad3 related (ATR) and is associated wit...

Replication of chromosomal DNA must be carried out to completion in order for a cell to proliferate. However, replication forks can stall during this process for a variety of reasons, including nucleoprotein 'roadblocks' and DNA lesions. In these circumstances the replisome copying the DNA may disengage from the chromosome to allow various repair processes to restore DNA integrity and enable re...

Forking is a mechanism of splitting in a community and is typically found in the free and open source software field. As a failure of cooperation in a context of open innovation, forking is a practical and informative subject of study. In-depth researches concerning the fork phenomenon are uncommon. We therefore conducted a detailed study of 26 forks from popular free and open source projects. ...

In the past few years various conjectures have been made concerning the relationship between simple theories and stable theories. The general thrust is that in a simple theory T forking should be accounted for by some kind of “stable fragment” of T . These issues were raised in discussions between Hart, Kim and Pillay in the Fields Institute in the autumn of 1996, but it is quite likely that ot...

RAD51 promotes homology-directed repair (HDR), replication fork reversal, and stalled fork protection. Defects in these functions cause genomic instability and tumorigenesis but also generate hypersensitivity to cancer therapeutics. Here we describe the identification of RADX as an RPA-like, single-strand DNA binding protein. RADX is recruited to replication forks, where it prevents fork collap...

Fork/join stations are used for modeling synchronization between entities, and fork/join queueing networks are natural models for a variety of communication and manufacturing systems: Parallel computer networks, fabrication/assembly systems, supply chains and material control strategies for manufacturing systems. Exact solutions of general fork/join networks can only be obtained by using numeri...