The plasmodium of Physarum polycephalum is renowned for spanning sources of nutrients with networks of protoplasmic tubes. The networks transport nutrients and metabolites across the plasmodium’s body. To imitate a hypothetical colonisation of the world and formation of major transportation routes we cut continents from agar plates arranged in Petri dishes or on the surface of a three-dimension...

A haloalkaline anaerobic microbial community obtained from soda lake sediments was used to inoculate anaerobic reactors for the production of methane rich biogas. The microalga Spirulina was successfully digested by the haloalkaline microbial consortium at alkaline conditions (pH 10, 2.0 M Na(+)). Continuous biogas production was observed and the obtained biogas was rich in methane, up to 96%. ...

Coccidiodal meningitis is a devastating complication of disseminated coccidioidomycosis. An animal model of this infection could enhance understanding of the pathogenesis of the disease and lead to improvements in therapy. A rabbit model of central nervous system infection simulating human disease was established using a blind cisternal tap technique to inoculate 4 x 10(3)-1 x 10(6) arthroconid...

A technique for inoculation with precise numbers of fungal spores on leaves and stems of plants was developed. The technique consisted of placing 1-μl drops with a fixed number of spores on the surface of leaves and stems, and covering each inoculum drop with a 10-μl drop of low-temperature gelling SeaPlaque agarose to fix the inoculum on the target site. With this technique single zoospores of...

The invention of peptide-MHC-tetramer technology to label antigen-specific T cells has led to an enhanced understanding of T lymphocyte biology. Here we describe the development of an in situ pMHC-II tetramer staining method to visualize antigen-specific CD4+ T cells in tissues. This method complements other methods developed that similarly use MHC class II reagents to stain antigen-specific CD...

The placenta of domestic sheep plays a key role in horizontal transmission of classical scrapie. Domestic goats are frequently raised with sheep and are susceptible to classical scrapie, yet potential routes of transmission from goats to sheep are not fully defined. Sparse accumulation of disease-associated prion protein in cotyledons casts doubt about the role of the goat's placenta. Thus, rel...

Microbial source tracking (MST) results, obtained using identical sample sets and pulsed field gel electrophoresis (PFGE), repetitive element PCR (rep-PCR) and ribotyping techniques were compared. These methods were performed by six investigators in analysis of duplicate, blind sets of water samples spiked with feces from five possible sources (sewage, human, dog, cow and seagull). Investigator...

This paper describes how basic concepts from information theory can be used to analyze deception. We show how a general definition of deception can be mapped to a simple communication model known as a Z-channel, and we show that any deception has associated with it a closely related deception we call it’s symmetric complement. These ideas allow computation of a specific form of conditional entr...

This paper provides a conceptual basis for the price discovery potential for tradable market instruments and specifically the development of mortgage securitization in Asia and the potential dangers of such markets. Nonetheless we argue for the potential importance of securitization in Asia because of its possible role in increasing transparency of the financial sector of Asian economies. We pu...

In the course of a screening for newmetabolites from strains of actinomycetes we disclosed Streptomyces sp. HKI 0180 as the producer of cuevaenes A (1) and B (2). The strain was isolated from a soil sample from the cave of Altamira (Spain). In this paper we report the production, isolation, structure elucidation and biological properties of 1 and 2 (Fig. 1). An agar slant culture of the above s...