So what are autapses good for? For many years, autapses in the brain had seemed like anatomical curiosities of unknown practical utility. Quite recently, however, experiments have begun to expose ways in which autapses might play subtle, but important, roles in brain function. One kind of experiment suggests that autaptic selfinhibition might act like a pendulum in a clock, maintaining the prec...

A software system is composed of a variety of artefacts, which are products of the various activities involved in the development process. In practice, software artefacts evolve at different paces and modifications applied to one artefact may not necessarily get reflected in other related artefacts. This differential evolution of software artefacts may result in synchronisation issues and incon...

An estimated 10% of all human genetic diseases are caused by nonsense mutations. These look like the stop codons that occur naturally at the ends of proteincoding sequences in our genomes, but they arise instead in the middle of the protein code, with potentially devastating consequences. Instead of faithfully trundling along a gene transcript, translating it into a useful protein product, the ...

To evaluate the diagnostic application of serum a-fetoprotein (AFP) and circulating immune complexes (CICs), AFP, 3% polyethylene glycol (PEG)-CICs, 4% PEG-CICs, and Clq-CICs were determined in 101 patients with cirrhosis alone, 101 sex-matched and age-matched cirrhotic patients with hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) and 54 healthy controls. Multivariate analysis indicated that AFP (odds ratio 1.0...