Parasitical paintings

Parasitical: A New Metabolite from Aspergillus parasiticus

Parasiticol, a metabolite structurally related to the aflatoxins, has been isolated and characterized. The compound is elaborated by several strains of the Aspergillus jiaDus series previously shown to be aflatoxin producers. The metabolite was separated and purified by chromatography Oll three columns (silicic acid, silica gel, and alumiua) followed by recrystallization from chlorofom,-bexane....

Looking Through Paintings

Protein structure paintings.

When artist Steve Miller met Nobel Laureate Rod MacKinnon at Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York, MacKinnon was investigating protein structures: specifically, how potassium ions move across cell membranes. Miller became fascinated with the visual tools MacKinnon used to grapple with the problem: 3D computer models of proteins, graphical equations and diagrams in the scientist’s notebook...

Distinguishing paintings from photographs

We addressed the problem of automatically differentiating photographs of real scenes from photographs of paintings. We found that photographs differ from paintings in their color, edge, and texture properties. Based on these features, we trained and tested a classifier on a database of 6000 paintings and 6000 photographs. Using single features results in 70–80% correct discrimination performanc...

Margaret McCartney: Medical journals and their parasitical profit.

Medical publishing is lucrative, but it is a parasitical profit, with rich pickings for the drug industry. The New England Journal of Medicine has set out its industry stall: in 1996 it decided that editorialists and reviewers should lack financial interests in the area under discussion, but it relaxed this policy in 2002. Its editor, Jeffrey M Drazen, recently wrote that he had made it “harder...