ABsrRAcr: Cells, tissues, organs, and human beings qua biological organisms have natural functions, but human beings qua moral agents do not. Persons-in-society, unlike organs-in-bodies, are the products of culture as well as nature. Bodily diseases, conventionally defined, are undesirable deviations from objectively identifiable biological norms. Mental diseases, similarly defined, are undesir...

The work reported in this paper addresses the issue of automatically tracking the faces and facial features of persons in head-and-shoulders video sequences. We propose two totally automatic algorithms which respectively perform the detection of head outlines and identify rectangular \eyes-nose-mouth" regions, both from downsampled binary thresholded edge images. Unlike ones that have been prop...

DeGrazia argues that post-persons have as much justification in believing that they have higher moral status than persons as persons have in believing that they have higher moral status than animals. DeGrazia's claim presupposes that what Buchanan calls the "moral equality assumption" is false. This article argues that DeGrazia has given us no reason to disbelieve the moral equality assumption....

In recent work, attempts have been made to link the structure of biochemical networks to their complex dynamics. It was shown that structurally stable network motifs are enriched in such networks. In this work, we investigate to what extent these findings apply to metabolic networks. To this end, we extend a previously proposed method by changing the null model for determining motif enrichment,...

Despite a wealth of information on cocaine-like compounds, there is no information on cocaine analogs with substitutions at C-1. Here, we report on (R)-(-)-cocaine analogs with various C-1 substituents: methyl (2), ethyl (3), n-propyl (4), n-pentyl (5), and phenyl (6). Analog 2 was equipotent to cocaine as an inhibitor of the dopamine transporter (DAT), whereas 3 and 6 were 3- and 10-fold more ...

BACKGROUND Infantile hemangiomas are common tumors, distinctive for their perinatal presentation, rapid growth during the first year of life, and subsequent involution-and for their expression of a unique immunophenotype shared by placental microvessels. Occasional "hemangiomas" differ from the classic form in presenting fully formed at birth, then following a static or rapidly involuting cours...

Solution properties of the copolymers and polymer blends which are under the influence of an unfavorable heteropolymer interaction are described. A body of experimental and computer simulation data indicates that the overall effects of the interaction on the conformational properties of copolymers are strongly dependent on their chain architecture. Typically, block copolymers are surprisingly i...

A letter in the peripheral visual field is much harder to identify in the presence of nearby letters. This is called “crowding”. In general, masking is a procedure: introducing any “mask” pattern that affects discriminability of the signal. Crowding conforms to the masking paradigm, but the crowding effect is unlike ordinary masking. Here we characterize crowding, and present diagnostic tests t...

The absent or atypical clinical signs in elderly persons hinder the management of coronary atherosclerotic disease. The cases of myocardial ischemia without pain, the so-called asymptomatic or silent ischemia, it is more frequent in elderly patient2. Considering patients with acute coronary syndrome, as myocardial infarction with ST-segment elevation, among those under 65 years of age, only 11....