In a recent article [1], the authors describe the process of issuing ‘well baby certificates’ to 1668 babies whose mothers opted for puerperal sterilization within a week of delivery. It is mentioned that 210 of these babies weighed less than 2.5 kg, out of which 17 weighed less than 2 kg (16 small for gestational age and one preterm). We have some concerns regarding the observations of the aut...

Intragenomic conflict occurs when some elements within the genome produce effects that enhance their own probability of replication or transmission at the expense of other elements within the same genome. Here it is proposed that mutations involved in intragenomic conflict are particularly likely to be co-opted by evolving lineages of cancer cells, and hence should be associated with the occurr...

We opted to work solely on localized (frame pair-wise) measures, seeking to establish just what they could contributed in a pure environment to the task. This clearly has significant impact on the ability to detect gradual transitions, as will be discussed later, but it was interesting to discover that our composite metrics could perform as well as they did (e.g., 30% recall & 33% precision for...

Tourism businesses operate globally and many have opted for a competitive advantage of internationalization. Technology, information and reduction of boundaries have created new forms of service companies, not only the large multinational corporations, but also small niche specialists. The growing importance of strategic alliances in creating networks of business relationships has become a tren...

CRK and CRKL adapter proteins play essential roles in development and cancer through their SRC homology 2 and 3 (SH2 and SH3) domains. To gain insight into the origin of their shared functions, we have investigated their evolutionary history. We propose a term, crk/crkl ancestral (crka), for orthologs in invertebrates before the divergence of CRK and CRKL in the vertebrate ancestor. We have iso...

The term medicalization has been defined as the process by which non-medical issues come to be defined and treated as medical problems. There are no better examples of this than pregnancy and childbirth. Prior to the intervention of physicians and hospitals, most females delivered unassisted or assisted by a relative or a midwife who usually had no formal education. As long as this remained the...

UNLABELLED The RNA-dependent RNA polymerase (RdRp) of influenza A virus is a heterotrimeric complex composed of the PB1, PB2, and PA subunits. The interplay between host factors and the three subunits of the RdRp is critical to enable viral RNA synthesis to occur in the nuclei of infected cells. In this study, we newly identified host factor DnaJA1, a member of the type I DnaJ/Hsp40 family, act...

Bacillus anthracis, the etiologic agent of anthrax, avoids immune surveillance and commandeers host macrophages as a vehicle for lymphatic spreading. Here, we show that B. anthracis edema toxin (ET), via its adenylyl cyclase activity, dramatically increases the motility of infected macrophages and the expression of vascular endothelial growth factor. The transcription factor CREB and the syndec...

Gene co-option, usually after gene duplication, in the evolution of development is found to contribute to vertebrate morphological innovations, including the endothelium-based vascular system. Recently, a zebrafish kank gene was found expressed in the vascular vessel primordium, suggesting KANK genes are a component of the developmental tool kit for the vertebrate vascular system. However, how ...

Spreadsheets are widely used in industry: it is estimated that end-user programmers outnumber programmers by a facto . However, spreadsheets are error-prone, numerous companies have lost money because of spreadsheet errors. One of the causes for spreadsheet problems is the prevalence of copypasting. This paper focuses on the methods of identifying data clone in spread sheets and their efficienc...