Spatial scan statistics with circular or elliptic scanning windows are commonly used for cluster detection in various applications, such as the identification of geographical disease clusters from epidemiological data. It has been pointed out that the method may have difficulty in correctly identifying non-compact, arbitrarily shaped clusters. In this paper, we evaluated the Gini coefficient fo...

We have tested the fate of a circularized synthetic pre-mRNA transcript in a whole cell splicing extract of Saccharomyces cerevisiae. Our results demonstrate that this circular precursor RNA is able to induce spliceosome formation in vitro and that the products of the following splicing reaction are the lariat-shaped intron, and a mature circular mRNA. Thus, it would appear that free 5' and/or ...

A dynamical system is box invariant if there exists a box-shaped positively invariant region. We show that box invariance can be checked in cubic time for linear and affine systems, and that it remains decidable for classes of nonlinear systems of interest (with polynomial structure). We present results on the robustness of box invariance for linear systems using spectral properties of Metzler ...

Guttaviridae is a family of enveloped viruses infecting hyperthermophilic archaea. The virions are ovoid or droplet-shaped, with a diameter of 55-80 nm and a length of 75-130 nm. The genome is a circular dsDNA molecule of around 14-20 kbp. The droplet-shaped morphology is unprecedented among viruses of bacteria and eukaryotes and represents a group of archaea-specific virion morphotypes. The fa...

We report a photothermal nanoblade that utilizes a metallic nanostructure to harvest short laser pulse energy and convert it into a highly localized and specifically shaped explosive vapor bubble. Rapid bubble expansion and collapse punctures a lightly-contacting cell membrane via high-speed fluidic flows and induced transient shear stress. The membrane cutting pattern is controlled by the meta...

Let K1,K2 be two compact convex sets in C. Their Minkowski product is the set K1K2 = {ab : a ∈ K1, b ∈ K2}. We show that the set K1K2 is star-shaped if K1 is a line segment or a circular disk. Examples for K1 and K2 are given so that K1 and K2 are triangles (including interior) and K1K2 is not star-shaped. This gives a negative answer to a conjecture by Puchala et. al concerning the product num...

A box-shaped 3D-DNA origami has been successfully constructed by selective closing of a preformed open motif, and identified by atomic force microscopy and dynamic light scattering analysis.

We have observed 60 edge-on galaxies in the NIR in order to study the stellar distribution in galaxies with box/peanut-shaped bulges. The much smaller amount of dust extinction at these wavelengths allows us to identify in almost all target galaxies with box/peanut-shaped bulges an additional thin, central component in cuts parallel to the major axis. This structure can be identified with a bar...