MICROBIOLOGY: A Tough Day Out for Nostoc

A day out with Darwin.

If you want to pay homage to Britain’s greatest poet and playwright, you must fight your way through the streets of Stratford-upon-Avon, alongside thousands of others who have come to visit a town that is almost entirely dedicated to Shakespeare’s memory. If, by contrast, you want to pay homage to Britain’s greatest scientist, you will need to take a train from London to one of its outer suburb...

Tough times call for tough decisions.

Out-of-home day care and health.

Evidence from randomised trials indicates that out-of-home day care has important effects in domains that are integral to the health of mothers and children. The evidence that day care results in cognitive gains is compelling. These effects and the long term effects in reducing crime and violence should suffice to put the question of day care provision high on the paediatric agenda. However, so...

A Tough Nut for Mathematical Knowledge Management

In this contribution we address two related questions. Firstly, we want to shed light on the question how to use a representation formalism to represent a given problem. Secondly, we want to find out how different formalizations are related and in particular how it is possible to check that one formalization entails another. The latter question is a tough nut for mathematical knowledge manageme...

A “Tough Nuts” Track for the IPC

In the development of the IPC, there is an ongoing conflict between pushing the frontiers, and consolidating our technology. With growing PDDL, it becomes ever more difficult to achieve both. We propose to introduce a separate instrument for consolidation. A “tough nut” is a domain that can be addressed, language-wise, by existing planning techniques, but that cannot be solved efficiently. In a...