“. . .though a Philosopher need not be sollicitous that his style should delight its Reader with his Floridnesse, yet I think he may very well be allow’d to take a Care that it disgust not his Reader by its Flatness, especially when he does not so much deliver Experiments or explicate them, as make Reflections or Discourses on them; for on such Occasions he may be allow’d the liberty of recreat...

We are interested in the following work in the doubly stochastic matrix nearness problem. Instances of this problems occurs in differents fields: aggregation of preferences in operational research, calculus of variations and shape optimisation, etc. We propose here a direct study via the projection theorem and a numerical resolution inspired by the alternating projections algorithm of Boyle-Dyk...

Although it has been known for more than a decade that the volume of isolated mitochondria is inversely related to the osmolarity of the surrounding medium (2, 3), it was not until 1955 that Tedeschi and Harris (4) demonstrated that mitochondria obey Boyle-van% Hoff’s Law. Since then, supporting evidence for the osmotic behavior of these subcellular structures has been ample (5, 6). In 1957 and...

The osmotic swelling of intact erythrocytes in hypotonic solutions was measured using microhematocrit tubes, Van Allen tubes, and a calibrated Coulter counter. In agreement with earlier workers the intact cells did not behave as perfect osmometers, the cells swelling less than predicted by the Boyle-van't Hoff law. Erythrocyte ghosts were prepared from fresh intact erythrocytes by one-step hemo...

Well prior to the invention of the term ̳biology‘ in the early 1800s by Lamarck and Treviranus, and also prior to the appearance of terms such as ̳organism‘ under the pen of Leibniz in the early 1700s, the question of ̳Life‘, that is, the status of living organisms within the broader physico-mechanical universe, agitated different corners of the European intellectual scene. From modern Epicureanis...

A regular language L is said to be cellular if there exists a 1-dimensional cellular automaton CA such that L is the language consisting of the finite blocks associated with CA. It is shown that cellularity of a regular language is decidable using a new characterization of cellular languages formulated by Freiling, Goldstein and Moews and implied by a deep result of Boyle in symbolic dynamics.