The impact of patent protection on biomedical innovation has been a controversial issue. Although a “medical anti-commons” has been predicted due to a proliferation of patents on upstream technologies, evidence to test these concerns is only now emerging. However, most industrial surveys that shed light on this issue are mainly from developed countries, making it very difficult to predict the i...

The Jarlskog rephasing invariant parameter |J | is evaluated using one of the six Unitarity Triangles involving well known CKM matrix elements |Vud|, |Vus|, | Vub Vcb |, |Vcd|, |Vcs| and |Vcb|. With PDG2000 values of |Vud| etc. as input, we obtain |J | = (2.71 ± 1.12) × 10 , which in the PDG representation of CKM matrix leads to the range 21 to 159 for the CP violating phase δ. The CKM matrix e...

The status of the heavy quark expansion for inclusive B decays is briefly reviewed from the perspective of confronting theory with data and of extracting the heavy quark parameters. A good agreement between properly applied theory and new precision data is observed. Some recent applications to the exclusive heavy flavor transitions are addressed. I recall the ‘ 1 2 > 3 2 ’ paradox for the trans...

We argue that there is strong experimental evidence in the data of band c-decays that the pattern of power suppressed corrections predicted by the short distance expansion, the heavy quark effective theory and the assumption of local duality is not correct for the non-leptonic inclusive widths. The data indicate instead the presence of 1/m corrections that should be absent in the above theoreti...

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

We show an interesting empirical formula of quark masses here, which is found by implementing a least squares fit. In this formula the measured QCD coupling is almost a ”best fitting coupling”. There are many papers working on the masses of quarks, in theory or in experiment. For theory, the difficulty is, masses of quarks can not been determined by first principle. The masses of known six quar...

The proliferation of quarks and leptons can be naturally explained by the assumption that they are composite objects. According to models of compositeness[1], known fermions are bound states of more fundamental constituents – preons [2] or a fermion and a boson [3]. In the framework of these models, constituents of known fermions interact by means of new strong gauge interactions. One of the ma...