Reto B. Schoch* Microsystems Laboratory, STI-LMIS, École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), CH-1015 Lausanne, Switzerland; Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 77 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139, USA; and Department of Biological Engineering, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 77 Massachusetts Avenue, ...

I WISH to express my thanks to the Royal College of Surgeons for the honour they have done me in asking me to deliver this lecture. Medicine owes 'a considerable debt of gratitude to the pathologists who, during the last hundred years, have so materially contributed to our understanding of the various diseases, but sometimes one wonders whether we did not pay a price for this. Several generatio...

Though our main technical result concerns random graphs in the G(n,p) model, let us mention other contexts in which threshold phenomena occur. One classical example is Percolation, an area started in physics. A typical question here is this: given a planar grid and 0 < p < 1. Create a graph by keeping each edge of the planar grid with probability p and removing each edge with probability 1-p. T...

A survey of the published electrophoretic mobilities of certain mammalian red cells reveals that the isoelectric points accorded to these cells are the result of equilibria incidental to red cell destruction. The electrophoretic mobilities of normal washed sheep and human cells have now been studied in 0.85 per cent NaCl solutions from about pH 3.6 to 7.4. All measurements were made within 2 mi...

Gravitons could permeate extra space dimensions inaccessible to all other particles, which would be confined to “branes”. We point out that these branes could be “fat” and have a non-vanishing width in the dimensions reserved for gravitons. In this case the other particles, confined within a finite width, should have “branon” excitations. Chiral fermions behave differently from bosons under dim...

The thermodynamic treatment of the interfacial region corresponding to two fluid phases in contact is discussed. The features of this analysis which are reviewed include the classical treatment of Gibbs and the extensions to this treatment which are due to Buff. It is shown that these extensions are essential if the logical structure of the analysis is to be regarded as complete.

The study of convective motions produced by unstable density distributions in a fluid is now highly developed. Most attention has been given to the case of a thin horizontal layer of fluid, heated below and cooled above, and results obtained using a combination of Boussinesq theory and laboratory experiments have been success­ fully applied in many contexts (Chandrasekhar 1961, Spiegel 1971). T...