Salinity gradient energy, which is also known as Blue energy, is a renewable energy form that can be extracted from the mixing of two solutions with different salinities. About 80% of the current global electricity demand could potentially be covered by this energy source. Among several energy extraction technologie...

Chimeric antigen receptor engineered-T (CAR-T) cells also named as living drugs, have been recently known as a breakthrough technology and were applied as an adoptive immunotherapy against different types of cancer. They also attracted widespread interest because of the success of B-cell malignancy therapy achieved by anti-CD19 CAR-T cells. Current genetic toolbox enabled the synthesis of CARs ...

Wheat (Triticum aestivum L.), with a large genome (16000 Mb) and high proportion ( approximately 80%) of repetitive sequences, has been a difficult crop for genomics research. However, the availability of extensive cytogenetics stocks has been an asset, which facilitated significant progress in wheat genomic research in recent years. For instance, fairly dense molecular maps (both genetic and p...

Edward Wilson (1998) recently popularized William Whewell’s nineteenth-century idea of “consilience.” The idea was a favorite of Darwin’s. It holds that seemingly disparate phenomena in the world are in fact connected. Nuclear physics is “remote” scientifically from the social sciences, yet nuclear reactions in the sun are the most important source of energy on earth, nuclear decay in the earth...

Proton emission is the radioactive decay mode that is expected to determine the limit of observable proton-rich nuclei for most elements. Considerable progress has been made in the study of proton-emitting nuclei since the first observation of direct proton emission nearly 50 years ago. This has led to improvements in our understanding of this decay process and provided invaluable nuclear struc...

As far back as 1870, i.e., about 150 years ago, Jules Verne described the accumulation of debris in the convergence zone of the North Atlantic Ocean in his famous novel entitled “Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea.” Many scientific reports have addressed this topic since and our main concern today is the ever increasing volume of marine litter invading the oceans in various and complex ways....

I review Chandra’s achievements in the last two years in AGN research. I concentrate on some topics of my interest; some others are reviewed in an accompanying article by K. Nandra. I comment briefly on the need to allow for the discovery space to ensure rapid progress in the field. 1. Chandra At Sharp Focus This meeting is called “Chandra At Sharp Focus”. So let me begin at the beginning when ...

Recent developments in technology suggest that within the next one to two decades some form(s) of quantum computing device will become viable. Once such devices become generally available they will doubtless be employed by cybercriminals to perform brute-force decryption tasks that were previously infeasible. This paper attempts to address the question of how digital forensic investigation tech...

The proteins of the mammalian neurotrophin family (nerve growth factor (NGF), brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF), neurotrophin-3 (NT-3) and neurotrophin-4/5 (NT-4/5)) were originally identified as neuronal survival factors. During the last decade, evidence has accumulated implicating them (especially BDNF) in addition in the regulation of synaptic transmission and synaptogenesis in the CN...

Down syndrome (DS) is caused by trisomy of chromosome 21 (Hsa21) and is associated with a number of deleterious phenotypes, including learning disability, heart defects, early-onset Alzheimer's disease and childhood leukaemia. Individuals with DS are affected by these phenotypes to a variable extent; understanding the cause of this variation is a key challenge. Here, we review recent research p...