A code called UNÌC is currently under development at Argonne National Laboratory (ANL). The aim of the code is to provide a neutronic solver with the same geometrical flexibility of Monte Carlo codes and without the approximations (homogenization and energy condensation) associated with the common multi-step approach currently used. Moreover, UNÌC will offer the capability of multi-resolution i...

Andy Clark has argued that language is “in many ways the ultimate artifact” (Clark 1997, p.218). Fuelling this conclusion is a view according to which the human brain is essentially no more than a patterncompleting device, while language is an external resource which is adaptively fitted to the human brain in such a way that it enables that brain to exceed its unaided (pattern-completing) cogni...

The performance of metal microelectrodes for stimulating and recording neuronal action potentials depends on precise control of their geometrical, electrical and mechanical properties. We describe a combination of materials whose properties approach fundamental physical limitations on achievable performance and reproducible fabrication techniques that provide probes with very small dimensions. ...

The ultimate regime of thermal convection, the so-called Kraichnan regime [R. H. Kraichnan, Phys. Fluids 5, 1374 (1962)]], hitherto has been elusive. Here numerical evidence for that regime is presented by performing simulations of the bulk of turbulence only, eliminating the thermal and kinetic boundary layers and replacing them with periodic boundary conditions.

Fibrotic disorders account for an increasing burden of disease-associated morbidity and mortality worldwide. Although numerous risk factors have been recognized, the etiologies of many of these clinical syndromes have not been identified, and they are often termed idiopathic or cryptogenic. Here, we provide an evolutionary perspective on fibrosis aimed at elucidating its etiopathogenesis. By as...

The ultimate prognosis of acute nephritis in children has always been a subject of interest to the paediatrician. The relative frequency of acute nephritis in childhood and the fact that many cases of renal failure in adult life cannot be explained, have led to repeated attempts to correlate the childhood illness with the adult renal failure. Until recent years and with traditional methods of e...

B.S. Johnson’s The Unfortunates (1969) is British fiction’s predominant attempt to embrace aleatorism and to subvert linear causality: the chapters are unbound, and the text invites the reader to shuffle them before reading. Narrative can be understood as a means of containing the ever-present risk of death, of disease, of loss, and has as its impetus a curative trajectory: recuperation is, per...

The last several decades have seen great changes in education. Technology has altered both the way we teach and learn. Students today are cited as being no less inherently intelligent than their peers of the past but as being much less focused and much less capable of the inductive thinking required for innovation. The attitude has shifted from needing to understand the basics to relying on tec...

The Nereid Monument in the Lycean tomb, dated to between 390 and 380 BCE, depicts a besieged city in which a woman is tearing out her hair in lament of her potential fate – rape, enslavement, and possibly death. The image testifies to the cruel and inhumane treatment of captives that often characterized ancient Greek warfare, particularly with respect to siege warfare. In ancient Greece, only t...