BACKGROUND Computational approaches have emerged as an instrumental methodology in modern research. For example, virtual screening by molecular docking is routinely used in computer-aided drug discovery. One of the critical parameters for ligand docking is the size of a search space used to identify low-energy binding poses of drug candidates. Currently available docking packages often come wit...

F-box proteins are part of one of the largest families of regulatory proteins that play important roles in protein degradation. In plants, F-box proteins are functionally very diverse, and only a small subset has been characterized in detail. Here, we identified a novel F-box protein FBX92 as a repressor of leaf growth in Arabidopsis. Overexpression of AtFBX92 resulted in plants with smaller le...

This paper presents a new generic technique, named sieve-in-the-middle, which improves meet-in-the-middle attacks in the sense that it provides an attack on a higher number of rounds. Instead of selecting the key candidates by searching for a collision in an intermediate state which can be computed forwards and backwards, we here look for the existence of valid transitions through some middle s...

This paper presents a new generic technique, named sievein-the-middle, which improves meet-in-the-middle attacks in the sense that it provides an attack on a higher number of rounds. Instead of selecting the key candidates by searching for a collision in an intermediate state which can be computed forwards and backwards, we look for the existence of valid transitions through some middle sbox. C...

Fractal scaling--a power-law behavior of the number of boxes needed to tile a given network with respect to the lateral size of the box--is studied. We introduce a box-covering algorithm that is a modified version of the original algorithm introduced by Song [Nature (London) 433, 392 (2005)]; this algorithm enables easy implementation. Fractal networks are viewed as comprising a skeleton and sh...

The well-known Tarski’s fixed point theorem asserts that an increasing mapping from an n-dimensional box to itself has a fixed point. In this paper, a constructive proof of this theorem is obtained from an application of the (n+1)-ray arbitrary starting simplicial algorithm. The algorithm assigns an integer label to each point of the box and employs a triangulation to subdivide the box into sim...

Ramsey theory assures us that in any graph there is a clique or independent set of a certain size, roughly logarithmic in the graph size. But how difficult is it to find the clique or independent set? If the graph is given explicitly, then it is possible to do so while examining a linear number of edges. If the graph is given by a black-box, where to figure out whether a certain edge exists the...

This paper presents a method that combines shadow detection and a 3D box model including shadow simulation, for estimation of size and position of vehicles. We define a similarity measure between a simulated image of a 3D box, including the box shadow, and a captured image that is classified into background/foreground/shadow. The similarity measure is used in an optimization procedure to find t...