In his book titled “Everything Is Obvious. Once You Know the Answer”, Duncan Watts posits that what we value as worthwhile is often determined by chance. He cites the case of the famous painting Mona Lisa that is now considered among the world’s masterpieces, and hangs in a special place in the Musée du Louvre in Paris. For centuries, the Mona Lisa was of no particular interest, and was thought...

For several of Leonardo da Vinci's paintings, such as The Virgin and Child with St Anne or the Mona Lisa, there exist copies produced by his own studio. In case of the Mona Lisa, a quite exceptional, rediscovered studio copy was presented to the public in 2012 by the Prado Museum in Madrid. Not only does it mirror its famous counterpart superficially; it also features the very same corrections ...

Mor)• biogeographic theory states that the number of species in a class or other large taxonomic unit that inhabits an island is maintained within narrow bounds by a dynamic steady state between colonization and extinction s (MacArthur and Wilson 1967). Although a recent experimental test of the theory upheld most of its expectations (Simberloff and Wilson 1969), there remains a paucity of data...

S. L. Chin, W. Liu, S. A. Hosseini, Q. Luo, F. Théberge, N. Aközbek, A. Becker, V. P. Kandidov and O. G. Kosareva Centre d’Optique, Photonique et Laser (COPL) & Département de Physique, de Génie Physique et d’Optique Université Laval, Québec, Qc. G1K 7P4, Canada. Timedomain Corp., Huntsville, Alabama, USA Max-Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex System, Dresden, Germany International Las...

There exists a sparse representation of blind and low-vision students in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) fields. This is due in part to these individuals being discouraged from pursuing STEM degrees as well as a lack of appropriate adaptive resources in upper level STEM courses and research. Mona Minkara is a rising fifth year graduate student in computational chemistry ...

An inventory of the weevil fauna of Mona Island, Puerto Rico, is provided. Sixteen new records and 5-9 new species are reported, yielding a total of 28 species of Curculionoidea for the island. The distribution and natural history of each species are briefly reviewed. As many as nine species are endemics, whereas 15 species are shared with Puerto Rico which was the primary source region for Pli...

The recommendations for controlling HIV/AIDS, whether prescriptive or descriptive, underscore the value of information: its translation into knowledge, and knowledge into behaviour. Thus, accessing, evaluating, disseminating and applying authoritative, credible and scholarly information on HIV/AIDS are critical elements in the control of this pandemic in the Web 2.0 era. The University of the W...