In many living trees, much of the interior of the trunk can be rotten or even hollowed out. Previously, this has been suggested to be adaptive, with microbial or animal consumption of interior wood producing a rain of nutrients to the soil beneath the tree that allows recycling of those nutrients into new growth via the trees roots. Here I propose an alternative (non-exclusive) explanation: suc...

Why are so many bird fl owers red? PLoS Biol 2(10): e350. and Luis Santamaría. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Open access, freely available online M ost bird-pollinated fl owers are both red and rich ...

Subjects: 84,182 patients admitted to specialty and general ICUs with an admitting diagnosis or procedure of acute coronary syndrome, ischemic stroke, intracranial hemorrhage, pneumonia, abdominal surgery, or coronaryartery bypass graft surgery. ICU type was determined by a local data coordinator at each site. Patients were classified by admission to a general ICU, a diagnosis-appropriate (“ide...

Although neurogenesis continues throughout life in the mammalian brain, the issue of whether the stem cells that drive the process in vivo are self-renewing and multipotent remains unclear. In a recent landmark paper by Bonaguidi et al. (2011) published in Cell, the authors provide clonal evidence that neural stem cells in the dentate gyrus of the adult hippocampus are indeed multipotent and un...

ne of the most comprehensive data sets available about Americans—how tall they are, when they last visited a dentist, what sort of cereal they eat for breakfast, whether they have to pee during the night, and, if so, how often—comes from a series of studies conducted by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Participants are chosen at random, interviewed at length, and subjecte...

ne of the greatest challenges in clinical medical practice is ltering it as new information becomes available. The onstant drive to understand and then apply new material is n overwhelming task, especially in cardiovascular diseases, nd far beyond the capacity of any single individual today. he amount of data (“data” in all its varieties and forms) hat must be evaluated, reviewed, interpreted, ...

*This chapter presents and develops what is essentially a numerical method, making use of enumeration data, that distinguishes between models that are solvable, such as staircase polygons, and unsolvable, in a particular sense, such as self-avoiding polygons. The measure of solvability is whether the generating function is differentiably finite or not. Numerical methods are developed that allow...