An update on the census of species of Archaea and Bacteria published recently in mBio (P. D. Schloss, R. A. Girard, T. Martin, J. Edwards, and J. C. Thrash, mBio 7:e00201-16, 2016, http://dx.doi.org/10.1128/mBio.00201-16) showed again that, despite ever-increasing sequencing efforts, the PCR-based retrieval of 16S rRNA genes is approaching saturation. On average, 95% of the genes analyzed today...

Medicine, as it stands today, did not develop overnight. It is the culmination of efforts of millions of people, some we know and others we do not. The flame of civilization, including medicine, started thousands of years ago. The flame has been handed over from one generation to another, and from one country to the other. Depending on who took the sacred responsibility of hosting it, sometimes...

Mesh numbering is a critical issue in Finite Element Methods, as the computational cost of one analysis is highly dependent on the order of the nodes of the mesh. This paper presents some preliminary investigations on the problem of mesh numbering using Evolutionary Algorithms. Three conclusions can be drawn from these experiments. First, the results of the up-to-date method used in all FEM sof...

We present a new method for estimating the number of solutions of constraint satisfaction problems 1. We use a stochastic forward checking algorithm for drawing a sample of paths from a search tree. With this sample, we compute two values related to the number of solutions of a CSP instance. First, an unbiased estimate , second, a lower bound with an arbitrary low error probability. We will des...

A k-forward numbering of a graph is a labeling of the nodes with integers such that each node has less than k neighbors whose labels are equal or larger. Distributed algorithms that reach a legitimate state, starting from any illegitimate state, are called self-stabilizing. We obtain three self-stabilizing (s-s) algorithms for finding a k-forward numbering, provided one exists. One such algorit...