the gathas, consisted of seventeen hymns, are the oldest literary work in iran. these hymns are composed in a syllabic meter and poetical language. in recent centuries, many scholarshave studied the gathas andhave consideredtheir poetic features. some scholars have tried to reveal gathas’ poetic technique on the bases of intertextual evidence, and have compared them with rig-veda. in this artic...

Probably the most important scientific breakthrough of the last quarter of the previous century was related to tremendous progress in cosmology. From a poor relative of distinguished family of fundamental science characterized by the words prescribed to L. Landau: “always in error but never in doubt”, cosmology turned, or is turning, into an exact science and possibly the most interesting one. ...

Following the advent of molecular assays that measure T cell receptor excision circles (TRECs) present in recent thymic emigrants, it has been conclusively shown that thymopoiesis persists in most adults, but that functional output decreases with age, influencing the maintenance of a diverse and functional T cell receptor (TCR) repertoire. Space flight has been shown to result in a variety of p...

This paper investigates the interaction between cultural evolution and biological evolution in the emergence of phonemic coding in speech. It is observed that our nearest relatives, the primates, use holistic utterances, whereas humans use phonemic utterances. It can therefore be argued that our last common ancestor used holistic utterances and that these must have evolved into phonemic utteran...

We investigate the problem of inferring contiguous ancestral regions (CARs) of the genome of the last common ancestor of all extant amniotes, based on the currently sequenced and assembled amniote genomes as ingroups and three teleost fish genomes as outgroups. We combine a methodological framework using conserved syntenies computed from whole genome alignments of amniote species together with ...

In contrast to adults, the murine neonatal CD4+ compartment contains a high frequency of recent thymic emigrants (RTEs). However, the functional capabilities of these cells in neonates are relatively unknown. Moreover, it has not been determined whether RTEs from neonates and adults are comparable. Here we have directly compared neonatal and adult CD4+ RTEs for the first time, using a transgeni...

The detection of superinfection involves an assessment whether the sequences obtained from a patient diverged from a last common ancestor within that patient, or several lineages were introduced by independent infection events. First we tested whether sequence divergence can be used to identify viral sequences of polyphyletic origin. In principle, a conservative divergence threshold could be es...