Spatial and temporal patterns in the onset, offset, and length of the snow season across Northern Hemisphere continents are examined for the period from 1967 to 2008. Full snow seasons (FSS) and core snow seasons (CSS) are defined based on the consistency of snow cover within a location over the course of the cold season. Climatologically, the seasonal onsets of FSS and CSS progress more rapidl...

Fluoroquinolones have become one of the mainstays of antibacterial therapy, regarded as a major antimicrobial class, with efficacy against a wide range of important pathogens. And among the fluoroquinolones, levofloxacin continues to stand out as one, if not the, most important fluoroquinolone. While the history of these agents first started in 1962 with the development of nalidixic acid, it wa...

Diverse seasonal flowering behaviors drive global adaption of bread wheat (Triticum aestivum), the major crop grown in temperate zones worldwide. Many wheats are sown in autumn and flower only after experiencing the prolonged cold of winter (vernalization). By delaying flowering until spring, the requirement for vernalization minimizes the risk that frost-sensitive flowers and developing grain ...

Subspace clustering is recognized as a more general and difficult task than standard clustering since it requires to identify not only objects sharing similar feature values but also the various subspaces where these similarities appear. Many approaches have been investigated for subspace clustering in the literature using various clustering paradigms. The reader is referred for instance to [5]...

The last four decades have seen the emergence and flourishing of the field of bioethics and its incorporation into wide-ranging aspects of society, from the clinic or laboratory through to public policy and the media. Yet considerable debate still exists over what bioethics is and how it should be done. In this paper I consider the question of what makes good bioethics. Drawing on historical an...

All naturalists know that the world is heterogeneous in space and time, for almost any physical property and at almost any scale one cares to examine. The diversity of life—the number of species that exist, and how they are organized into complex communities—must reflect in some way the magnitude and structure of that hetereogeneity. Ecologists use random quadrats to sample the world. The insig...

"A man for all seasons" -Sir Thomas More, so described by Robert Whittington in 1520. "More is a man of an angel's wit and singular learning. And as time requireth a man of marvellous mirth and pastimes and sometimes of a sad gravity. A man for all seasons". Since David Bolt's play, these words have become somewhat hackneyed and over-plagiarized and I do offer a scant apology in their use again...