BACKGROUND Despite the ban on misleading descriptors such as light or mild cigarettes in Europe, there are still widespread misperceptions of the relative harmfulness of different brands of cigarettes among smokers. This study examined the extent to which smokers in three European countries believed that some cigarette brands are less harmful and why, using data from the International Tobacco C...

To compensate for significant time delays in the control of human bipedal stance, it was suggested that a feed-forward control mechanism is needed to generate a preceding motor command to the body sway position observed in quiet standing. In this article, we present evidence that a feedback proportional-derivative (PD) controller can effectively generate a desired preceding motor command. We al...

Most biological processes are regulated through complex networks of transient protein interactions where a globular domain in one protein recognizes a linear peptide from another, creating a relatively small contact interface. Although sufficient to ensure binding, these linear motifs alone are usually too short to achieve the high specificity observed, and additional contacts are often encoded...

What do you think are the big questions to be answered next in your field? Complete sequences for genomes, large and small, are generating boatloads of questions and opportunities, which will keep us all busy for a long time yet. For example, what are all the mystery genes doing — the numerous predicted genes that have no informative sequence similarities, nor any obvious phenotypes in knockout...

ment, under-appreciated aspects of the role of sarcomeric myosin motors (cross bridges) in regulation of the heart beat. Relatively recent and compelling evidence has substantially expanded the limited textbook view of the role of cross bridges in the heart beat and in regulation of contractility. One aspect of this textbook view is that cross bridges react with actin and undergo state transiti...