M protein of the group A streptococcus is an elongated, alpha-helical coiledcoil molecule that extends from the bacterial cell surface as a flexible fibrillar structure (1, 2). It is a major virulence factor for the bacteria, by virtue of its property of impeding the phagocytosis of the organisms (3). >75 serologically distinct variants of the M protein have been recognized over the years and, ...

Piscivorous wildlife, such as mink (Mustela vison), routinely are exposed to mercury (Hg) in their natural environment at levels that may cause adverse behavioral outcomes. The purpose of this study was to determine if a correlation exists between neurochemical receptors and concentrations of Hg in the brains of wild mink. Specifically, receptor-binding assays were conducted to characterize the...

Heterotic M-Theory is a promising candidate for that corner of M-theory which makes contact with the real world. However, while the theory requires one of its expansion parameters, ǫ, to be perturbatively small, a successful phenomenology requires ǫ = O(1). We show that the constraint to have small ǫ is actually unnecessary: instead of the original flux compactification background valid to line...

Neural networks have been widely used as a tool for regression. They are capable of approximating any function and they do not require any assumption about the distribution of the data. The most commonly used architectures for regression are the feedforward neural networks with one or more hidden layers. In this paper, we present a network pruning algorithm which determines the number of units ...