After All, Only Millions?

After All, Only Millions?

An update on the census of species of Archaea and Bacteria published recently in mBio (P. D. Schloss, R. A. Girard, T. Martin, J. Edwards, and J. C. Thrash, mBio 7:e00201-16, 2016, http://dx.doi.org/10.1128/mBio.00201-16) showed again that, despite ever-increasing sequencing efforts, the PCR-based retrieval of 16S rRNA genes is approaching saturation. On average, 95% of the genes analyzed today...

All and Only

This paper is a note on a very simple and elementary fact having to do with reasoning about relations. The kinds of reasoning that we have in mind come from two different areas: extended syllogistic logics and description logics. In extended syllogistic logic, one wants to reason about terms formed from binary relations and terms. We illustrate with some examples from the recent paper van Rooij...

If only we all cared.

Millions of 'snips' will harm millions of men.

To the Editor: No one knows how many people die due to HIV-related causes in South Africa every year. According to the latest statistical release, HIV is the 9th leading underlying cause of death in the country.1 This is hard to believe. Research has shown that only about 25% of all deaths related to HIV are notified as such2 – either ‘HIV’ as an underlying or contributing cause of death is lef...

On Millions of Cores ∗

Petascale parallel computers with more than a million processing cores are expected to be available in a couple of years. Although MPI is the dominant programming interface today for large-scale systems that at the highest end already have close to 300,000 processors, a challenging question to both researchers and users is whether MPI will scale to processor and core counts in the millions. In ...