John Stuart Mill’s hedonism is notoriously ambiguous. The most important ambiguity concerns his reliance on an axiologically significant notion of quality of pleasure. (Hereafter: “quality”.) His resulting “higher pleasures doctrine” has given rise to a number of interpretive disputes concerning, for instance, the nature of quality, the relative value of higher pleasures in comparison to lower ...

SUMMARY Improving and ascertaining the quality of a multiple sequence alignment is a very challenging step in protein sequence analysis. This is particularly the case when dealing with sequences in the 'twilight zone', i.e. sharing < 30% identity. Here we describe INTERALIGN, a dedicated user-friendly alignment editor including a view of secondary structures and a synchronized display of carbon...

[1] The rate of oxygen utilization beneath the sunlit surface ocean provides a measure of the export rate of biologically produced carbon to the deep sea, and its variation with depth suggests where remineralization of that carbon occurs. The latter consideration is relevant to the efficiency of carbon sequestration in deep water. However, accurate characterization of this process, particularly...

Recent exponential increase of protein sequences creates a challenge for automated annotation methods. When sequence based methods (e.g. PSIBLAST [1]) fail to identify a possible homologue (generally below 25% of protein identity i.e. within so-called twilight zone), fold recognition methods offers additional sensitivity [2,4,5,8]. However, training, validating and comparing fold recognition pe...

Coastal acidification has been widely investigated in terms of its rationale and ecological effects the last decade. However, driving mechanism for open seawater, especially mesopelagic water, is still poorly understood. Here, sinking velocity flux attenuation particulate organic carbon (POC) were examined based upon radioactive 210 Po- Pb tracer to reveal remineralization POC zone northeastern...

Caves possess a continuum of ecological zones that differ in their microhabitat conditions, resulting gradient nutrients, climate, and illumination. These conditions engender relatively rapid speciation diverse assemblages highly specialised spider fauna. It is unclear, however, how zonation these caves affects assemblage composition structure. Surveys 35 Levantine were conducted to compare the...