Measuring the Vicious Ones

The Ones We Know and the Ones We Don’t

When you open your eyes in the morning, you usually see what you expect to see. Often it will be your bedroom, with things where you left them before you went to sleep. What if you opened your eyes and unexpectedly found yourself in a steaming tropical jungle? Why do we have expectations about what is about to happen to us? Why do we get surprised when something unexpected happens to us? More g...

Families of Vicious Walkers

We consider a generalisation of the vicious walker problem in which N random walkers in R are grouped into p families. Using field-theoretic renormalisation group methods we calculate the asymptotic behaviour of the probability that no pairs of walkers from different families have met up to time t. For d > 2, this is constant, but for d < 2 it decays as a power t, which we compute to O(ε) in an...

Vicious Chronicles of Virology

Presented in this article, aimed at both the virologists and non-virologists among the readers, are the dark episodes of virology. These anecdotes overshadow, in comparison, the effects of Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bomb explosions, both in impact and magnitude. Needless-tosay, the episodes listed here involve viruses and may represent re-recording of largest outbreaks of some viral infectio...

Vicious Circles in Disease

Breaking a vicious cycle.

Despite prodigious advances in tumor biology research, few tumor-biomarker tests have been adopted as standard clinical practice. This lack of reliable tests stems from a vicious cycle of undervaluation, resulting from inconsistent regulatory standards and reimbursement, as well as insufficient investment in research and development, scrutiny of biomarker publications by journals, and evidence ...