A Rare Decade Where Magic Could Happen

A Lot Can Happen in a Decade

This issue marks the 10-year anniversary of PLOS Biology, and it’s as good a time as any to pause and take stock of how the last decade, PLOS, and PLOS Biology have seen irreversible changes in academic publishing. And these changes are for the better. Historically, individual decades have seen changes in social norms and attitudes, changes that have, very occasionally, resulted in the unthinka...

Tetartohedral twinning could happen to you too

Tetartohedral crystal twinning is discussed as a particular case of (pseudo)merohedral twinning when the number of twinned domains is four. Tetartohedrally twinned crystals often possess pseudosymmetry, with the rotational part of the pseudosymmetry operators coinciding with the twinning operators. Tetartohedrally twinned structures from the literature are reviewed and the recent structure dete...

Two-way thermodynamics: Could it really happen?

In previous publications I have suggested that opposite thermodynamic arrows of time could coexist in our universe. This letter responds to the comments of H. D. Zeh (previous letter in this journal). In 2002 a conference took place in Bielefeld, entitled, " The direction of time: The role of reversibil-ity/irreversibility in the study of nature " [1]. In my presentation I spoke about recent wo...

Banning 'magic mint' could slow research.

On Where Things Could Be

Some philosophers have replied to Leibniz’s “shift” argument against the reality of absolute space by appealing to anti-haecceitist doctrines about possible worlds, influenced especially by David Lewis’s counterpart theory. But separated from Lewis’s distinctive views about what possible worlds are, it is difficult to understand what those doctrines really amount to, and why they are relevant t...