Background: Extraterrestrial Encounter While humanity has not yet encountered an extraterrestrial civilization, this possibility cannot be ruled out. Some evidence suggests that an encounter may be likely. If an encounter occurs, it would be of profound significance for humanity. There thus has been much debate on the outcome of an encounter. Opinions are sharply divided on whether extraterrest...

We report on a natural field experiment on quantity discounts involving more than 14 million consumers. Implementing price reductions ranging from 9-70% for large purchases, we found remarkably little impact on revenue, either positively or negatively. There was virtually no increase in the quantity of customers making a purchase; all the observed changes occurred for customers who already were...

Background. One of the most difficult challenges for conservation biology is to reconcile growing human demands for resources with the rising need for protecting nature. Wind farms producing renewable energy have been recognised to be a threat for birds, but clear directives for environmental planning are still missing. Methods. Point counts were performed to study the relationship between eigh...

We describe the prototype QA system built by MIRACLE group, a group composed by three Madrid universities and the spin-off, DAEDALUS. The system is an elaboration of our last year system with several improvements in question analysis and NERC components. We submitted two runs for the Spanish runs with different strategies to use NE in passage selection and answer ranking. Results show that a re...

Text by Mitch Leslie [email protected] Brief encounter A t fi rst glance, some of the cell’s communication proteins seem ill-suited for the job. They are embedded in the outer layer of the plasma membrane and have no direct connection to the cell interior. Yet they manage to relay signals across the membrane. The proteins tend to congregate, and on page 169, Chen et al. show that this gre...

I felt the world narrow as I looked at her, a frail woman tonight thin and grey, lent animus by memory and desperation and loneliness. She gestured weakly as I came to her and said something, muffled, under the thick, coiled tubing which snaked to the mask bound about her face. I took the straps off, and at this early morning hour she straightened her hair feebly, gazing in the darkness as the ...