A correspondent has asked me about the origins of a legend which has become known as 'The phage in the letter'. Common to all variants of this story is the following: one scientist, called X, sends a request to another, Z, for a particular bacteriophage strain which Z has discovered. Z replies saying he is not sending it out. X thereupon plates out the letter and retrieves the phage from it. So...

Documenting the process of consumer attitude formation toward brand extensions has proved elusive, with variations in results between Aaker & Keller’s original study and subsequent replications. This study moves beyond the student sample and adjusts for multicollinearity, providing a robust empirical foundation for generalising components of the original model. It provides general support for t...

Performing and receiving tattoos are typically forbidden in American prisons. What are the intentions of this prohibition? How well does the policy meet its intentions? How well does it promote the broader ends of prison institutions; to protect justice, provide efficient correctional services, rehabilitate criminals, and deter crime? I argue that repealing the prohibition of inmate tattooing w...

Here we show that designed transcription activator-like effectors (TALEs) that bind to defined areas of the interferon beta promoter are capable to induce IFN-beta expression and signaling in human cells. Importantly, TALE-mediated IFN-beta signaling occurs independently of pathogen pattern recognition but effectively prohibits viral RNA replication as demonstrated with a hepatitis C virus repl...

A little over twenty years ago, a group of scientists assembled in Asilomar, California, to consider the consequences of the newly invented techniques of genetic engineering, or recombinant DNA, as it later came to be called. There was in place a moratorium recommended by scientists and which we, working for the UK's Medical Research Council, had been instructed to heed by the Secretary of the ...

In her paper, "Adventure Tales, Colonialism, and Alexander Montgomery's Australian Perspective," Christine Doran discusses an early nineteenth-century example of Australian literature dealing with Southeast Asia. The text analysed is about Borneo, in a collection of short stories by Alexander Montgomery entitled Five-Skull Island and Other Tales of the Malay Archipelago, published in Melbourne ...

Recently, researchers (E. Festa-Martino, B. R. Ott, & W. C. Heindel, 2004; A. Tales, J. L. Muir, A. Bayer, R. Jones, & R. J. Snowden, 2002; A. Tales, J. L. Muir, A. Bayer, & R. J. Snowden, 2002 have found significantly abnormal spatial orienting together with the abolishment of the alerting effect in Alzheimer's disease (AD). However, these research groups differed in their interpretation of th...