Agent planning programs are finite-state programs, possibly containing loops, whose atomic instructions consist of a guard, a maintenance goal, and an achievement goal, which act as precondition-invariance-postcondition assertions in program specification. The execution of such programs requires generating plans that meet the goals specified in the atomic instructions, while respecting the prog...

The primary goal of relational databases is to provide e cient query processing on sets of tuples and thereafter, query evaluation and optimization strategies are a key issue in database implementation. Producing universally fast execution plans remains a challenging task since the underlying relational model has a significant impact on algebraic definition of the operators, thereby on their im...

dead yeast cells are an abundant residue of the brazilian ethanol industry and the industries still don’t have a proper or desirable destiny for all these cells, which means tons of vitamins and proteins that have not a major end. in the other hand, heavy metal residues are a problem, especially for leather industry, where brazil is also a great producer. in this work, dead yeast cells were us...

Alcoholic hepatitis (AH) is a clinical syndrome characterized by jaundice and liver failure that develops in subjects with chronic and active alcohol abuse [1]. The shortterm mortality in patients with severe disease, as defined by the Maddrey’s discriminant function, exceeds 30% [2]. Up to now, only two drugs, prednisolone and pentoxifylline, have shown some efficacy for the treatment of this ...

In protein redesign one of the main challenges is the ability to evaluate many different conformations of the redesigned protein in order to determine the best structure. One approach to this problem is to provably get rid of bad protein conformations using dead-end elimination (DEE). DEE was first developed for application to protein structure evaluation by Desmet et al. [1]. Since then there ...

Fusion of cellular membranes during normal biological processes, including proliferation, or synaptic transmission, is mediated and controlled by sophisticated protein machinery ensuring the preservation of the vital barrier function of the membrane throughout the process. Fusion of virus particles with host cell membranes is more sparingly arranged and often mediated by a single fusion protein...

Recent techniques for inferring business relationships between ASs [1, 2] have yielded maps that have extremely few invalid BGP paths in the terminology of Gao [3]. However, some relationships inferred by these newer algorithms are incorrect, leading to the deduction of unrealistic AS hierarchies. We investigate this problem and discover what causes it. Having obtained such insight, we generali...

Critics of sexual conflict theory argue that females may gain a net reproductive benefit from mating with manipulative males because the direct costs that they suffer may be offset by the production of sexy, i.e. manipulative, sons. However, this exclusive focus on nuclear gene effects represents an incomplete view of female fitness. Females differ fundamentally from males in transmitting not o...