We review recent progress at the two e + e − B factories. The first measurement of CP violation and the prospects for measuring all the angles of the unitarity triangle are discussed.

special issue focusses on the theme of metabolic engineering and the design of cellular factories. This is a very timely issue given that we sit at a newly developing nexus between systems biology understanding and synthetic biology design and construction [1]. The tangible result of these forces is a newfound capacity to rapidly produce an expanding array of new molecules in recombinant organi...

In the current economic climate, for many businesses it is generally no longer sufficient to pursue exclusively economic interests. Instead, integrating ecological and social goals into the corporate targets is becoming ever more important. However, the holistic integration of these new goals is missing from current factory planning approaches. This article describes the conceptual framework fo...

The rapid increase in the number of diabetic patients globally and exploration of alternate insulin delivery methods such as inhalation or oral route that rely on higher doses, is bound to escalate the demand for recombinant insulin in near future. Current manufacturing technologies would be unable to meet the growing demand of affordable insulin due to limitation in production capacity and hig...

In spite of many recent advances in MEMS technologies for integrated planar devices, most products of the future will continue to require assembly from separate parts because of differing material property requirements, the need to have a three-dimensional extent, or because of many different end user functional needs. Because many products will be very small and complex, or larger products wil...

Beyond the factory floor, there is an even larger opportunity to improve performance. The true world-class competitors have discovered this opportunity and have extended the principles that worked on the factory floor to the upstream processes that feed production, "white collar" factories. They have reorganized their white collar factories, moving away from junctional organization toward proce...

"The share of children employed in English cotton factories fell significantly before the introduction of effective child labor legislation in the early 1830s. The early factories employed predominantly children because adults without factory experience were relatively unproductive factory workers. The subsequent growth of the cotton industry fostered the development of a labor market for produ...

Search is essential for constraint programming. Search engines typically combine several features like state restoration for backtracking, best solution search, parallelism, or visualization. In current implementations like Mozart, however, these search engines are monolithic and hard-wired to one exploration strategy, severely complicating the implementation of new exploration strategies and p...

After the discovery by Tevatron of B s − Bs-oscillations D and D remains the last flavor neutral meson system with unobserved mixing. Neutral meson mixing is characterized by parameters x = ∆M/Γ and y = ∆Γ/2Γ, where ∆M and ∆Γ are the mass and width difference between the two CP eigenstates. The SM box diagram in D ↔ D transitions is strongly GIM and CKM suppressed. However, D mixing can be enha...

Most of the hosts used to produce the 151 recombinant pharmaceuticals so far approved for human use by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and/or by the European Medicines Agency (EMEA) are microbial cells, either bacteria or yeast. This fact indicates that despite the diverse bottlenecks and obstacles that microbial systems pose to the efficient production of functional mammalian proteins, ...