The Mysterious Number 137

Leptospirosis: The “mysterious” mimic

Leptospirosis is a potentially fatal bacterial disease that can display a wide array of clinical presentations thus mimicking better-known illnesses. Although, leptospirosis is primarily a zoonotic disease, it frequently inflicts severe illness and death on communities around the globe. A comprehensive overview of the disease in wake of the 2006 outbreaks in India is hereby presented and discus...

The mysterious specific indefinite

When an indefinite newly introduces or reintroduces an accessible referent into the discourse, it is called specific. Thus, in (1a), it can be coreferential with a lion in the previous sentence, which indicates a particular lion in the relevant situation. By contrast, a nonspecific indefinite has no specific referent at all, as is illustrated in (1b), where a lion can be any lion. In that case,...

The Mysterious Whiteboard

This paper raises the question of why electronic whiteboards are not ubiquitous. The paper provides a design-oriented analysis of traditional as well as electronic whiteboards in the context of collaborative and individual activities. We offer a novel perspective on whiteboards for collaborative activity based on a survey of the electronic whiteboard literature, a series of interviews with user...

Mysterious Marriage

And Mysterious

" I think you might do something better with the time " , Alice said, " than wasting it in asking riddles that have no answer "-from A Mad Tea-Party Abstract. First year undergraduates usually learn about the classical Rolle's theorem saying that between two consecutive zeros of a smooth function f one can always find at least one zero of f ′. But what happens with the zeros of higher derivativ...