BACKGROUND Asthma is prevalent but treatable: adherence to evidence-based treatment lessens impairment and lowers the risk of future exacerbations. OBJECTIVE This report details recent trends in asthma prevalence, health care use, and mortality since 2001 and presents an overview of trends since 1980. METHODS Asthma prevalence estimates were obtained from the National Health Interview Surve...

The mechanism by which gauge and gravitational anomalies cancel in certain string theories is reviewed. The presentation is aimed at theorists who do not necessarily specialize in string theory. Talk presented at 2001: A Spacetime Odyssey – the inaugural conference of the Michigan Center for Theoretical Physics

After years of efforts to push the LEP performance to, and indeed beyond, the limits of what had been believed possible, hints of a signal of a Higgs boson at 115GeV/c appeared in June 2000, were confirmed in September, and confirmed again in November. Spending an additional six-month period with LEP would have given the unambiguous opportunity of a fundamental discovery. Instead, this possibil...

machines that can interact with them as they interact with each other. Science fiction writers have given us these goals in the form of HAL in 2001: A Space Odyssey and Commander Data in Star Trek: The Next Generation. However, at present, our computers are deaf, dumb, and blind, almost unaware of the environment they are in and of the user who interacts with them. In this article, I present th...

The pH on the frustule of individual cells of the marine centric diatoms Coscinodiscus granii and Coscinodiscus wailesii (Bacillariophyceae) was measured with pH microsensors in culture media with increasing pH values of 8.04, 8.14, and 8.22, respectively. In 85-96% of the C.granii cells the pH on the frustule was up to 0.4 units higher than that of the medium, reaching a maximum pH 8.95. Only ...

Why do computers need emotional intelligence? Science fiction often portrays emotional computers as dangerous and frightening, and as a serious threat to human life. One of the most famous examples is HAL, the supercomputer onboard the spaceship Discovery, in the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey. HAL could express, recognize and respond to human emotion, and generally had strong emotional skills – t...