Depending on their nature, different chemical bonds show vastly different stability with covalent bonds being the most stable ones that rupture at forces above nanonewton. Studies have revealed that ferric-thiolate bonds are highly covalent and are conceived to be of high mechanical stability. Here, we used single molecule force spectroscopy techniques to directly determine the mechanical stren...

Current debate concerns the pace at which domesticated plants emerged from cultivated wild populations and how many genes were involved. Using an individual-based model, based on the assumptions of Haldane and Maynard Smith, respectively, we estimate that a surprisingly low number of 50-100 loci are the most that could be under selection in a cultivation regime at the selection strengths observ...

Synaptic vesicle endocytosis requires membrane curvature, fission, and uncoating. Endophilin has been proposed to play a role in all three steps, but in this issue of Neuron, De Camilli and colleagues show that at mammalian central synapses it is primarily involved in clathrin uncoating.

It is widely believed that to efficiently represent an otherwise smooth object with discontinuities along edges, one must use an adaptive representation that in some sense ‘tracks’ the shape of the discontinuity set. This folk-belief — some would say folk-theorem — is incorrect. At the very least, the possible quantitative advantage of such adaptation is vastly smaller than commonly believed. W...

BACKGROUND Saccharomyces yeasts are an important model system in many areas of biological research. Very little is known about their ecology and evolution in the wild, but interest in this natural history is growing. Extensive work with lab strains in the last century uncovered the Saccharomyces life cycle. When nutrient limited, a diploid yeast cell will form four haploid spores encased in a p...

This paper nds a link between the sharp drop in U.S. manufacturing employment after 2001 and the elimination of trade policy uncertainty resulting from the U.S. granting of permanent normal trade relations to China in late 2000. We nd that industries where the threat of tari hikes declines the most experience greater employment loss due to suppressed job creation, exaggerated job destruction an...

Twitter has become the de facto information sharing and communication platform. Given the factors that influence language on Twitter – size limitation as well as communication and content-sharing mechanisms – there is a continuing debate about the position of Twitter’s language in the spectrum of language on various established mediums. These include SMS and chat on the one hand (size limitatio...