WASHINGTON -The House of Representatives voted 292-136 yesterday for landm ark legisla­ tion that would change the way m ost Americans pay their in­ com e taxes while shifting a big share of the burden to co rpo ra­ tions. The bill was hailed as the m ost thorough income-tax revision ever. The political breakdown: 176 D em ocrats and I 16 Republicans voted yes; 74 Dem ocrats and 62 Republicans ...

peace accords signed between 1988 and 1998, thirty-one failed to last more than three years.1 Contributing to their failure was the behavior of so-called spoilers: those who use violence or other means to undermine negotiations in the expectation that a settlement will threaten their power or interests.2 The stakes for understanding spoiler behavior are high. Where parties kept spoilers at bay,...

The two-step matching process When an organ offer is made, a second cascade of screening events occurs. LifeLink Transplantation Immunology Laboratory in Tampa, FL, performs real-time nucleic-acid testing (NAT), which allows for the detection of HIV, West Nile virus, and hepatitis B genetic material. NAT is a more stringent protocol than simply testing the body’s response to an infectious disea...

Let f be a boolean function. Define the circuit complexity of . . . No, wait! Let’s back up a little bit. Let me tell you how we ended up here. We are in Berkeley, California, in a circular-shaped building on the university campus. It is week five in the life of the Simons Institute for the Theory of Computation. This institute is named after James Harris Simons, an American mathematician who s...

Concentration gradients inside cells are involved in key processes such as cell division and morphogenesis. Here we show that a model of the enzymatic step catalized by phosphofructokinase (PFK), a step which is responsible for the appearance of homogeneous oscillations in the glycolytic pathway, displays Turing patterns with an intrinsic length-scale that is smaller than a typical cell size. A...

Solid-state chemistry of cluster compounds with metals in the left part of the periodic table is described. As a function of the metal valence electron concentration (VEC), characteristic changes occur with stepwise changing features. Strongly metal-metal-bonded and ligand-encapsulated clusters exist for large values of VEC. At decreased values, endohedral atoms stabilize the clusters, and with...

Even though parchment has been applied as library and archive substrate for centuries, this material’s structure and degradation patterns are less explored than paper’s ones. In this preliminary work vibrational studies highlighting distinction between parchment components are presented. Advances in conservation methods can in fact be achieved by an improved knowledge of the microscopic and spe...

The transversity of quarks inside unpolarized hadrons and its phenomenology are discussed. Several experimental suggestions are proposed that would allow further study of this intrinsic handedness.