Background: The Viridiplantae comprise two major phyla: the Streptophyta, containing the charophycean green algae and all land plants, and the Chlorophyta, containing the remaining green algae. Despite recent progress in unravelling phylogenetic relationships among major green plant lineages, problematic nodes still remain in the green tree of life. One of the major issues concerns the scaly bi...

The classical problem of the thermal explosion in a long cylindrical vessel is modified so that only a fraction alpha of its wall is ideally thermally conducting while the remaining fraction 1-alpha is thermally isolated. Partial isolation of the wall naturally reduces the critical radius of the vessel. Most interesting is the case when the structure of the boundary is a periodic one, so that t...

Genetic evolution is slow. Progress in artificial intelligence is fast (Kurzweil 2005). Only a handful of genes separate Homo sapiens from our hominid ancestors on the African savannah. Among our 23,000-odd protein-coding genes, variance in single nucleotide polymorphisms accounts for just a small percentage of phenotypic variance in intelligence as measured by what we call IQ tests. True, the ...