We provide a brief overview of some current experimental and theoretical issues of heavy quark production.

................................................................................................................................................... i Acknowledgements ................................................................................................................................. ii Table of

The 3 P 0 decay model is briefly reviewed. Possible improvements, partly motivated by the examination of a microscopic description of a quark–anti-quark pair creation , are considered. They can provide support for the one-body character of the model which, otherwise, is difficult to justify. To some extent, they point to a boost effect that most descriptions of processes involving a pair creati...

Non-trivial patterns of quark and lepton masses and mixings can arise without there being any underlying flavor symmetry that distinguishes among the three families. Two realistic examples are given.

Molecular imaging enables the visualization and quantitative analysis of the alterations of biological procedures at molecular and/or cellular level, which is of great significance for early detection of cancer. In recent years, deep leaning has been widely used in medical imaging analysis, as it overcomes the limitations of visual assessment and traditional machine learning techniques by extra...