A broad and a narrow level of a quantum dot connected to two external leads may swap their respective occupancies as a function of an external gate voltage. By mapping this problem onto a multiflavored Coulomb gas we show that such population switching is not abrupt. However, trying to measure it by adding a third electrostatically coupled lead may render this switching an abrupt first order qu...

Dear Sirs, As a health economist, I read with interest the article by Mahan et al. which calculates the monetary burden of deep-vein thrombosis (DVT) in the absence of pulmonary embolism (PE) (1). Mahan et al. multiply numbers of incident and recurrent DVT cases by average costs per incident or recurrent case. That approach requires estimates of incidence and recurrence derived from population-...

The formalism for a linear-response many-body treatment of the electronic contributions to thermal transport is developed for multilayered nanostructures. By properly determining the local heat-current operator, it is possible to show that the Jonson-Mahan theorem for the bulk can be extended to inhomogeneous problems, so the various thermal-transport coefficient integrands are related by power...

Growth heterogeneity within microbial populations has been thought to increase fitness by allowing some cells to survive an unpredictable change to a harsh environment. A new study demonstrates that heterogeneity can increase fitness even in the absence of environmental changes.