The use of random samples to approximate properties of geometric configurations has been an influential idea for both combinatorial and algorithmic purposes. This chapter considers two related notions—ǫ-approximations and ǫ-nets—that capture the most important quantitative properties that one would expect from a random sample with respect to an underlying geometric configuration. An example pro...

Botulinum neurotoxins (BoNTs) cause botulism and are the deadliest naturally-occurring substances known to humans. BoNTs have been classified as one of the category A agents by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, indicating their potential use as bioweapons. To counter bio-threat and naturally-occurring botulism cases, well-tolerated antibodies by humans that neutralize BoNTs are re...

We give a $(1+\epsilon)$-approximate distance oracle with $O(1)$ query time for an undirected planar graph $G$ with $n$ vertices and non-negative edge lengths. For $\epsilon>0$ and any two vertices $u$ and $v$ in $G$, our oracle gives a distance $\tilde{d}(u,v)$ with stretch $(1+\epsilon)$ in $O(1)$ time. The oracle has size $O(n\log n ((\log n)/\epsilon+f(\epsilon)))$ and pre-processing time $...

We developed a method to estimate genotype-specific average relative mortality risk, R, from genotype distributions in cross-sectional studies of people belonging to different age-groups, and applied the method to new data from a study of apolipoprotein E genotypes (apoE) in 177 Danish centenarians and data from a study of 40-year-old Danish men. Twenty-one percent of the centenarians were epsi...

Since 1936, when the type E strain of Clostridium botulinum was first established as a result of the work of Gunnison et al. (1936), 17 outbreaks of Type E botulism have been reported, involving 69 persons, of whom 21 died (Dolman and Chang, 1953; Dolman et al., 1955). Although the large proportion of fatalities suggests that this organism is highly toxigenic, published reports indicate that in...

Genotoxic activities of a series of commercially purchased 1,N6-ethenoadenosine (epsilon-Ado) and epsilon-deoxyadenosine (epsilon-dAdo) derivatives were assessed using the sister chromatid exchange (SCE) assay in murine spleen lymphocytes in vitro. Of the epsilon-Ado adducts evaluated for SCE induction epsilon-ATP and epsilon-dATP were highly active (5x baseline) SCE inducers over a concentrati...

It has been known that endothelin-1 (ET-1) exerts important actions in gastrointestinal smooth muscle motility, but its precise mechanism remains unsolved. We investigated the intracellular mechanism of ET-1-induced circular smooth muscle cell contraction in cat esophagus. ET-1 produced contraction of smooth muscle cells isolated by enzymatic digestion. The contraction in response to ET-1 was c...

We review the current status of calculations of the two pion decays of the kaon using the firstprinciples methods of lattice gauge theory and the significant challenges that these calculations pose. While a calculation with controlled errors at even the 10-20% level has not yet been performed, present results suggest that such a calculation of the real and imaginary parts of the ∆I = 3/2 amplit...

Clostridium (C.) perfringens is a Gram-positive anaerobic spore-forming bacterium. Disease caused by C. perfringens infection is called enterotoxaemia. C. perfringens strains are classified on the basis of the lethal exotoxins formed by the bacteria. Epsilon toxin is one of the major lethal toxins and is formed by C. perfringens types B and D. C. perfringens is an ubiquitous bacterium. Infectio...