We extend the common theme of random Apollonian packing of circles to consider orientable grains with a noncircular shape. Systems of up to 10(6) grains are examined for a range of polygonal and elliptical shapes using both the random Apollonian packing model and the new rotational random Apollonian packing model which takes into account the extra rotational degree of freedom of noncircular gra...

Ductile compaction is common in many natural systems, but the temporal evolution of such systems is rarely studied. We observe surprising oscillations in the weight measured at the bottom of a self-compacting ensemble of ductile grains. The oscillations develop during the first ten hours of the experiment, and usually persist through the length of an experiment (one week). The weight oscillatio...

A formerly renowned researcher in the field of nutrition and immunology has lost his court bid to win damages from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation over a 2006 documentary. The programme alleged that Ranjit Kumar Chandra never conducted published studies into the immune benefits of baby formula and other studies that found a protective effect of multivitamins on cognition and infection in ...

Avoiding associatively learned predictors of danger is crucial for survival. Aversive memories can, however, become counter-adaptive when they are overly generalized to harmless cues and contexts. In a fruit fly odor-electric shock associative memory paradigm, we found that learned avoidance lost its specificity for the trained odor and became general to novel odors within a day of training. We...

Germline breast cancer 1 (BRCA1) variants are associated with a high risk of breast and ovarian cancers. Many BRCA1-mediated cancers are initially responsive to platinum-based therapy; however, resistance commonly develops. The BRCA1185delAG mutation is common in the Ashkenazi Jewish population and has been thought to result in loss of function due to the introduction of a stop codon in the 5' ...

The St. Joseph Circuit Court issued an injunction Tuesday a g a in s t e ig h t r e s i d e n t s of Wooded E s ta te s , p ro h ib i t in g them from c h a r g in g fan s to park vehicles on their property during Notre Dame home foot­ ball games. According to the injunction, such behavior qualifies as com­ mercial activity on residential property, violating Section 21-8 of the city code, along...

This paper analyses the e¤ects of public funding of higher education on the welfare of the di¤erent agents. It takes into account the hierarchical nature of the educational system and also the fact that parents always have the possibility to complement basic public education with private expenditures in individual tutoring. It is obtained that although public funding implies a larger access to ...

Cherubism, a case of bone remodeling gone haywire, is associated with mutations in the adaptor protein SH3BP2. Two papers in this issue of Cell (Guettler et al. and Levaot et al.) demonstrate that these mutations disrupt the interaction between SH3BP2 and Tankyrase and describe rules for substrate recognition by this poly(ADP-ribose) polymerase. Establishing such rules paves the way to identify...