We report the first study to examine phylogenetic relationships and drug resistance mutations in HIV-1 pol sequences from Panama. For this study, we used plasma RNA samples from 135 HIV-1-infected subjects from Panama, of which 82 (61%) had AIDS and 53 (39%) were asymptomatic drug-naïve individuals. Phylogenetic analyses revealed that 133 (98%) subjects were infected with subtype B viruses and ...

In 1979 a family planning and maternalchild health (FP/MCH) survey was conducted in Panama by the Population Studies Office of Panama’s Ministry of Health, with technical assistance from the Family Planning Evaluation Division of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control (1). This type of survey, conducted in several Latin American countries, has been useful in providing demographic and program data...

The ascidian fauna of the Pacific coast of Panama is poorly known and only recently four species in the family Ascidiidae were reported on. Ascidia is the only known genus of Ascidiidae in Pacific Panama waters. In the present research, we describe a new species, Ascidia sideralis sp. nov., and we document the new occurrence of A. cf. gemmata and A. cf. liberata (both previously known to the We...

O'Dea et al. challenged the inference that the Isthmus of Panama has been in place for the last 10 million years or more and from "an exhaustive review and reanalysis of geological, paleontological, and molecular records," they argued for a "formation of the Isthmus of Panama sensu stricto around 2.8 Ma." I review environmental changes since ~5 Ma throughout Earth, and I argue that environmenta...

PANAMA is a cryptographic module that was presented at the FSE Workshop in ’98 by Joan Daemen and Craig Clapp. It can serve both as a stream cipher and as a cryptographic hash function, with a hash result of 256 bits. PANAMA achieves high performance (for large amounts of data) because of its inherent parallelism. We will analyse the security of PANAMA when used as a hash function, and demonstr...