The great Marxist sinologist Joseph Needham blamed Buddhism for stifling science and technology in China while they flourished in Europe. In claiming that everything is an illusion, Buddhism ‘played a part in strangling the development of Chinese science’. Zen Buddhism, in ‘rejecting all philosophy’ was also unfavourable to a scientific view. Since the Buddha refused to speculate, Buddhism disc...

Baseball players, works of art and rare postage stamps have value in the market place partially as a function of their rarity. What is it about human nature that drives some to chase a postage stamp or coin, precisely because it is rare, and others of us to crave the stamp of approval that comes with publishing a paper in a prestige journal? It is not uncommon for prestige-seeking journals (or ...

Within the nuclei of eukaryotic cells, the density of chromatin is nonuniform. We study the influence of this nonuniform density, which we derive from microscopic images [Schermelleh L, et al. (2008) Science 320:1332-1336], on the diffusion of proteins within the nucleus, under the hypothesis that chromatin density is proportional to an effective potential that tends to exclude the diffusing pr...

While there is ample evidence that children treat words as mutually exclusive, the cognitive basis of this bias is widely debated. We focus on the distinction between pragmatic and lexical constraints accounts. High-functioning children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) offer a unique perspective on this debate, as they acquire substantial vocabularies despite impoverished social-pragmatic s...

The concept of pharmaceutical data exclusivity protection comes from the West. The Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) establishes the basic rules for pharmaceutical data exclusivity protection. People's Republic of China's domestic law is consistent with the TRIPS agreement. In the drug registration approval process of the People's Republic of China's Dru...