“O this date [in 1618] Abu’l Hasan the artist, who had been awarded the title Nadir al-Zaman [Wonder of the Age], presented a painting he had made .... Since it was worthy of praise, he was shown limitless favor. Without exaggeration, his work is perfect, and his depiction is a masterpiece of the age.” These were the words of Emperor Jahangir of the Mughal Dynasty of India. “Abu’l Hasan’s fathe...

Gaussian scale-space is considered to be a modern bottom-up tool in computer vision. The Amer-ican and European vision community, however, is unaware of the fact that Gaussian scale-space has already been axiomatically derived in 1959 in a Japanese paper by Taizo Iijima. This result formed the starting point of an entire world of linear scale-space research in Japan ranging from various axiomat...

The energy spectra of ultra-high energy cosmic rays reported by the AGASA, Fly’s Eye, Haverah Park, HiRes, and Yakutsk experiments are all shown to be in agreement with each other for energies below 1020 eV (after small adjustments, within the known uncertainties, of the absolute energy scales). The data from HiRes, Fly’s Eye, and Yakutsk are consistent with the expected flux suppression above ...

Meningococcal disease is a worldwide life-threatening infection associated in many cases with debilitating long-term sequelae, both within the military and civilian populations. Military recruits are at a higher risk of acquiring this infection due to numerous factors, such as young recruits in the age group 18-25 years, high carriage rates of meningococci, communal and crowed living quarters a...

It says in the report by Wang et al. that a negative group velocity u = −c/310 is obtained and that a pulse advancement shift 62-ns is measured. The authors claim that the negative group velocity is associated with superluminal light propagation and that the pulse advancement is not at odds with causality or special relativity. However, it is shown here that their conclusions above are not true...

Memory training for older adults often produces gains that are limited to the particular memory tasks encountered during training. We suggest that memory training programs may be misguided by an implicit "generalist" assumption-memory training on a couple of memory tasks will have a positive benefit on memory ability in general. One approach to increase memory-training benefits is to target tra...

Wild poliovirus type 3 (WPV3) has not been seen anywhere since the last case of WPV3-associated paralysis in Nigeria in November 2012. At the time of writing, the most recent case of wild poliovirus type 1 (WPV1) in Nigeria occurred in July 2014, and WPV1 has not been seen in Africa since a case in Somalia in August 2014. No cases associated with circulating vaccine-derived type 2 poliovirus (c...