To avoid collisions, flies steer away from expanding visual scenes generated during straight flight: so how do they fly forward when no collision is imminent? A new study shows that wind compensates for this aversion, allowing flies to forge ahead.

We present a new fast approach for surface segmentation of thin structures, like vessels and vascular trees, based on Fast Marching and Level Sets methods. Fast Marching allows segmentation of tubular structures in¤ating a “long balloon” from a user given single point. However, when the tubular shape is rather long, the front propagation may blow up through the boundary of the desired shape clo...

December 2006 | Volume 4 | Issue 12 | e418 Most governments around the world set conservation policy based on the assumption that resource exploitation and species protection can co-exist in the same place. These policies have led to Orwellian “marine protected areas” that host commercial fi shing operations, leading one to wonder who’s protecting whom. A new study reveals the danger of this ap...

The cryostats of the ATLAS LAr calorimeter system are installed in the ATLAS cavern since several years. Following this, an effort to install and commission the front-end and back-end read-out electronics as well as the timing, trigger and control electronics (infrastructure, crates, and boards) has been ongoing and is finished now, in time for the cavern closure. Following cautious procedures ...

This paper employs Data Envelopment Analysis to measure for the first time the performance of Greek domestic equity mutual funds over four different one-year horizons and for the whole four-year period. In particular, the model used examines whether fund managers employ inputs (i.e. assets, loads, and risk) efficiently to produce output (returns). The results demonstrate that the efficient fund...