Recommender Systems need to deal with different types of users who represent their preferences in various ways. This difference in user behaviour has a deep impact on the final performance of the recommender system, where some users may receive either better or worse recommendations depending, mostly, on the quantity and the quality of the information the system knows about the user. Specifical...

The sea urchin (Echinodermata: Echinoidea) masticatory apparatus, or Aristotle's lantern, is a complex structure composed of numerous hard and soft components. The lantern is powered by various paired and unpaired muscle groups. We describe how one set of these muscles, the lantern protractor muscles, has evolved a specialized morphology. This morphology is characterized by the formation of ada...

Sea biscuits and sand dollars diverged from other irregular echinoids approximately 55 million years ago and rapidly dispersed to oceans worldwide. A series of morphological changes were associated with the occupation of sand beds such as flattening of the body, shortening of primary spines, multiplication of podia, and retention of the lantern of Aristotle into adulthood. To investigate the de...

DENOSINE TRIPHOSPHATE (ATP) appears to play a critical role in maintaining the integrity of the red cell. In the “Storage lesion,” the disappearance of high energy bonds represented largely by ATP correlates well with the loss of viability of erythrocytes upon reinfusion into the circulation.1’2 In early studies, erythrocyte ATP was estimated by determining “easily hydrolysable” phosphorus.1 ’4...

Background: Bioluminescence in fireflies and click beetles is produced by a luciferase-luciferin reaction. The luminescence property and protein structure of firefly luciferase have been investigated, and its cDNA has been used for various assay systems. The chemical structure of firefly luciferin was identified as the D-form in 1963 and studies on the biosynthesis of firefly luciferin began ea...

The sanatorium was central to tuberculosis treatment in the 19th and early 20th centuries. The long-drawn nature of treatment and the highly infectious nature of the disease made the sanatorium regimen effective and popular before antibiotics entered the scene. The sanatorium was not just a hospital, it was a social world – isolated from the rest of society it created its own definition of “com...

Improved techniques consisting of glutaraldehyde fixation, Giemsa staining, and colony counter enumeration of foci in viral infectivity assays were compared to microscope scanning and lantern slide projection methods. These techniques broadened the scope of application to potentially hazardous viruses and increased the efficiency of assaying.

A long-standing contrast in academic discussions of science concerns its perceived disenchanting or enchanting public impact. In one image, science displaces magical belief in unknowable entities with belief in knowable forces and processes and reduces all things to a single technical measure. In the other, science is itself magically transcendent, expressed in technological adulation and an im...

Very high energy γ-rays have recently been detected from the microquasar LS I +61 303 using the MAGIC telescope. A phenomenological study on the concomitant neutrinos that would be radiated if the γ-ray emission is hadronic in origin is herein presented. Neutrino oscillations are considered, and the expected number of events in a km-scale detector such as ICECUBE is computed under different ass...