Vision is often characterized as a spatial sense, but what does that characterization imply about the relative ease of processing visual information distributed over time rather than over space? Three experiments addressed this question, using stimuli comprising random luminances. For some stimuli, individual items were presented sequentially, at 8 Hz; for other stimuli, individual items were p...

In a recent review, VanRullen (2011) concludes that electrophysiological data should not be filtered at all when one is interested in the temporal dynamics or onset latencies of the electrophysiological responses. This conclusion was based on the observation that response onset latency was “smeared out in time for several tens or even hundreds of milliseconds” (p. 6) in a simulated dataset. It ...

The first protein structures were determined in the 1950s. In the decades that followed, development of new methods for sample preparation, crystallization, data collection, and structure analysis yielded tens of thousands of biomolecular structures. This short review highlights some of the major technical advances exemplified with selected structures.

Quantifying human group dynamics represents a unique challenge. Unlike animals and other biological systems, humans form groups in both real (offline) and virtual (online) spaces-from potentially dangerous street gangs populated mostly by disaffected male youths to the massive global guilds in online role-playing games for which membership currently exceeds tens of millions of people from all p...

We report rational molecular designs for acceleration of the color-fading speed of photochromic 3H-naphthopyrans. By using steric and electrostatic repulsions induced by substituents at the 2- and 10-positions of 3H-naphthopyrans, the color-fading speed accelerates from tens of minutes to microsecond time scales. The long-lived residual color, which is an important problem to be solved for indu...

Comparing measurements of redshift-space distortions (RSDs) with geometrical observations of the expansion of the Universe offers tremendous potential for testing general relativity on very large scales. The basic linear theory of RSDs in the distant-observer limit has been known for 25 years and the effect has been conclusively observed in numerous galaxy surveys. The next generation of galaxy...

• The CHOReOS Enactment Engine provides an easy and automated way to deploy large-scale choreographies in the Cloud. By using the CHOReOS software, the underlying infrastructure is kept transparent both to the choreography developer and to the end-user. Deploying tens of choreographies, each of them with hundreds of services running on hundreds of Cloud machines becomes much easier when using t...

The EDOS research project aims at contributing to the quality assurance of free software distributions. This is a major technical and engineering challenge, due to the size and complexity of these distributions (tens of thousands of software packages). We present here some of the challenges that we have tackled so far, and some of the advanced tools that are already available to the community a...

Perhaps the most obvious contrast in quality of timing is that between human and animal performance. In both cases considerable evidence is provided that mean times are quite accurate and that, to a first approximation anyhow, all distributions of normalized responses are the same. However, substantial differences exist between the animal and human data in the magnitude of the relative variabil...

Recent years have seen the increasing use of passive dosemeters that have high sensitivities and, in laboratory conditions, detection limits of <10 µSv. However, in real operational use the detection limits will be markedly higher, because a large fraction of the accrued dose will be due to natural background, and this must be subtracted in order to obtain the desired occupational dose. No matt...