Interrupting Ebola

Vasovagal syncope interrupting sleep?

Clinical data are reported for 13 patients who were referred with recurrent loss of consciousness at night interrupting their sleep. Most of the patients were women (10 of 13) with a mean age of 45 years (range 21-72 years). The histories were more consistent with vasovagal syncope than with epilepsy. This was supported by electroencephalographic and tilt test results. More polysomnographic mon...

Time-Regularized Interrupting Options

High-level skills relieve planning algorithms from low-level details. But when the skills are poorly designed for the domain, the resulting plan may be severely suboptimal. Sutton et al. (1999) made an important step towards resolving this problem by introducing a rule that automatically improves a set of skills called options. This rule terminates an option early whenever switching to another ...

R waves interrupting T waves.

In the course of some experiments on anesthetized dogs and cats concerned with the production experimentally of ventricular flutter and ventricular fibrillation, Fastier and Smirk (1948) noted that R waves sometimes appeared on the descent of the antecedent T waves, shortly before the onset of veittricular flutter. The flutter was induced by a substance amarin * which had been found by one of u...

Michael T. McManus: Interrupting biology

The human genome encodes snippets of RNAs ranging from 21–23 nucleotides in length, called microRNAs (miRNAs). Rather than code for proteins, miRNAs instead sabotage the translation of mRNAs. miRNAs are first generated as longer, hairpin-like precursors in the nucleus. In the cytoplasm, a collection of enzymes strips down the hairpins into their tiny and unwound final structure. miRNA-bound mRN...

Using the Untested Ebola Drug in Ebola Affected Patients: An Ethical Dilemma