It would be nice to have a mathematical understanding of basic biological concepts and to be able to prove that life must evolve in very general circumstances. At present we are far from being able to do this. But I’ll discuss some partial steps in this direction plus what I regard as a possible future line of attack. Can Darwinian evolution be made into a mathematical theory? Is there a fundam...

The degradation of Transport Control Protocol (TCP) throughput in networks with lossy links is mainly due to the coexistence of two types of losses, congestion losses and link corruption losses. This is very similar to processor performance degradation due to control hazards in CPU design. First, two types of loss events in networks with lossy links can be considered as two possibilities of a b...

In the platypus, electroreceptors are located in rostro-caudal rows in skin of the bill, while mechanoreceptors are uniformly distributed across the bill. The electrosensory area of the cerebral cortex is contained within the tactile somatosensory area, and some cortical cells receive input from both electroreceptors and mechanoreceptors, suggesting a close association between the tactile and e...

Pruritus in hepatobiliary disease is commonly believed to be caused by retention of bile acids with their sequestration in the skin. HOwever, we have recently demonstrated that skin levels of bile acids in patients with cholestasis correlate poorly with pruritus. In this report, we present additional data concerning the relationship of pruritus to bile acid retention: (1) the urinary excretion ...

T his article presents some general speculations on possible transportation systems of the future and outlines the effects that these systems may have on the engineering profession in particular and society in general. The overall tone of the discussion is intentionally provocative rather than prescriptive in nature. The intent is to encourage our profession to anticipate and plan for the futur...

Convincing evidence has accumulated that unintended transgene escape occurs in oilseed rape, maize, cotton and creeping bentgrass. The escaped transgenes are found in variant cultivars, in wild type plants as well as in hybrids of sexually compatible species. The fact that in some cases stacked events are present that have not been planted commercially, implies unintended recombination of trans...

This paper provides a brief review of the history of our understanding and knowledge of black holes. Starting with early speculations on “dark stars” I discuss the Schwarzschild "black hole" solution to Einstein’s field equations and the development of its interpretation from "physically meaningless" to describing the perhaps most exotic and yet "most perfect" macroscopic object in the universe...

The "attention schema" theory provides one possible account of the biological basis of consciousness, tracing the evolution of awareness through steps from the advent of selective signal enhancement about half a billion years ago to the top-down control of attention, to an internal model of attention (which allows a brain, for the first time, to attribute to itself that it has a mind that is aw...

Plants are highly intelligent organisms. They continuously make distributed processing of sensory information, concurrent decision making and parallel actuation. The plants are efficient green computers per se. Outside in nature, the plants are programmed and hardwired to perform a narrow range of tasks aimed to maximize the plants’ ecological distribution, survival and reproduction. To ‘persua...