Oh, my pretty hair. Belief, Tradition and Image

My oh my(osin): Insights into how auditory hair cells count, measure, and shape

The mechanisms underlying mechanosensory hair bundle formation in auditory sensory cells are largely mysterious. In this issue, Lelli et al. (2016. J. Cell Biol. http://dx.doi.org/10.1083/jcb.201509017) reveal that a pair of molecular motors, myosin IIIa and myosin IIIb, is involved in the hair bundle's morphology and hearing.

Lions and tigers and bears, oh my!

Monsters and dragons and sharks--oh my!

Lions, hyenas and mobs (oh my!)

Understanding the factors that facilitate the emergence of cooperation among organisms is central to the study of social evolution. Spotted hyenas Crocuta crocuta frequently cooperate to mob lions Panthera leo, approaching the lions as a tightknit group while vocalizing loudly in an attempt to overwhelm them and drive them away. Whereas cooperative mobbing behavior has been well documented in b...

Graphs, branchwidth, and tangles! Oh my!

Branch decomposition-based algorithms have been used in practical settings to solve some NP-hard problems like the travelling salesman problem (TSP) and general minor containment. The notions of branch decompositions and branchwidth were introduced by Robertson and Seymour to assist in proving the Graph Minors Theorem. Given a connected graph G and a branch decomposition of G of width k where k...