The Social Construction of Disaster Disaster is widely perceived as an event beyond human control. The capricious hand of fate has moved against unsuspecting human communities, creating massive destruction and despair.[i] The sudden randomness of the event accentuates the cruelty of its effects, as surely the victims would have acted differently, had they known the risk. Other nations and organ...

Some of the signaling molecules required for formation of long-term memories are involved primarily in adult brain function, but others participate in a variety of other biological processes. The Notch signaling pathway, which is important for cell fate specification and differentiation in various systems, is also active in the mature brain. Here, we review evidence from recent studies indicati...

The process of cell fate determination has been depicted intuitively as cells travelling and resting on a rugged landscape, which has been probed by various theoretical studies. However, few studies have experimentally demonstrated how underlying gene regulatory networks shape the landscape and hence orchestrate cellular decision-making in the presence of both signal and noise. Here we tested d...

Stem cells have the capacity to differentiate into various lineages, and the ability to reliably direct stem cell fate determination would have tremendous potential for basic research and clinical therapy. Nanotopography provides a useful tool for guiding differentiation, as the features are more durable than surface chemistry and can be modified in size and shape to suit the desired applicatio...

8Love never fails; but if there are gifts of prophecy, they will be done away; if there are tongues, they will cease; if there is knowledge, it will be done away. 9For we know in part and we prophesy in part; 10but when the perfect comes, the partial will be done away. 11When I was a child, I used to speak as a child, think as a child, reason as a child; when I became a man, I did away with chi...

Shape-memory polymers (SMPs) are a new class of smart materials, which have the capability to change from a temporary shape 'A' to a memorized permanent shape 'B' upon application of an external stimulus. In recent years, SMPs have attracted much attention from basic and fundamental research to industrial and practical applications due to the cheap and efficient alternative to well-known metall...

In embryos of glossiphoniid leeches such as Helobdella triserialis and H. robusta, pairs of adjacent 'o/p' ectodermal blast cells are known to be developmentally equipotent and yet eventually contribute distinct sets of 'O' and 'P' progeny to the nervous system and epidermis of the mature leech. It has been thought that the fate-determining interactions in this 'O-P equivalence group' take plac...

During development, embryonic cells display a large variety of behaviors that lead to the formation of embryonic structures that are frequently transient. Simultaneously, cells progress towards a specific fate. The current challenge for embryologists is to resolve how these two distinct aspects of development co-exist. As cell behaviors (including elementary cellular operations such as motility...

Concast is a scalable “inverse-multicast” network service: messages sent from multiple sources toward the same destination are merged into a single message that is delivered to the destination. The mapping from sent messages to received messages is programmable, so the service can be tailored to the needs of specific applications. However, the service can also be used as a building block for ot...

We present a novel method for estimating 3-D positions of near light sources by using highlights on the outside and inside of a single clear hollow sphere. Conventionally, the positions of near light sources have been estimated by using observed highlights on multiple reference objects, e.g. mirror balls.