At a briefing of United Nations officials on treating Ebola patients in western Africa with medicines and blood products in November last year, one question came up again and again: “Why is it taking so long?” Officials wanted to know why Ebola patients who have been evacuated to Europe or North America have had higher survival rates than those who remained in the outbreak countries, says scien...

At a briefing of United Nations officials on treating Ebola patients in western Africa with medicines and blood products in November last year, one question came up again and again: “Why is it taking so long?” Officials wanted to know why Ebola patients who have been evacuated to Europe or North America have had higher survival rates than those who remained in the outbreak countries, says scien...

PURPOSE The incidence of acanthamoeba keratitis (AK) in the UK is some 15 times that in the United States and seven times that in Holland. To investigate reasons for this higher frequency, a study of the role of domestic tap water as a potential source of AK was undertaken. METHODS Tap outlets from the homes of 27 patients with culture-proven AK were sampled and cultured for free-living amoeb...

The free-living amoeboflagellate Naegleria fowleri is the causative agent of primary amoebic meningoencephalitis (PAM), a rapidly fatal disease of the central nervous system. In the United States, the disease is generally acquired while swimming and diving in freshwater lakes and ponds. In addition to swimming, exposure to N. fowleri and the associated disease can occur by total submersion in b...

In many applications, no linear classifier over the “raw” set of features will perfectly separate the data. One recourse is to find additional features that are predictive of the label. This is called feature engineering, and is often a substantial part of the job of a machine learning practitioner. In some applications, it is possible to “throw in the kitchen sink”—i.e., include all possible f...