Physical simulation has long been the approach of choice for generating realistic hair animations in CG. A constant drawback of simulation, however, is the necessity to manually set the physical parameters of the simulation model in order to get the desired dynamic behavior. To alleviate this, researchers have begun to explore methods for reconstructing hair from the real world and even to esti...

In This Issue In This Issue Ready…set…fuse he fusion of two lipid membranes underlies a huge range of biological phenomena, from infection by enveloped viruses to the secretion of cellular proteins , but a central aspect of membrane fusion has remained mysterious: do the T proteins that mediate fusion act cooperatively or independently? On page 833, Markovic et al. argue that teamwork is the or...

Compared with its ASEAN neighbors, Vietnam appears to have weathered the Asian crisis quite well. Official statistics indicate a GDP growth rate of 6.6 per cent for the first half of 1998; export growth remains positive, and the dong has depreciated by only 20 per cent against the USD. But the relatively favorable picture has more to do with controls than with sound economic fundamentals. In th...

Good tools can bring mechanical verification to programs written in mainstream functional languages. We use hs-to-coq to translate significant portions of Haskell’s containers library into Coq, and verify it against specifications that we derive from a variety of sources including type class laws, the library’s test suite, and interfaces from Coq’s standard library. Our work shows that it is fe...

GLUT4 ready to go esicles containing the glucose transporter GLUT4 travel rapidly on a microtubule network that lies just under the plasma membrane in resting cells, according to results from Lizunov et al. (page 481). The vesicles occasionally touch the plasma membrane and, when stimulated by insulin, quickly fuse with it. GLUT4 is sequestered in vesicles in resting cells. Insulin exposure ind...

For useful feedback in physiotherapy interventions for geriatric rehabilitation, we have designed and tested two prototypes, based on commercially available radio frequency tags. The prototypes were designed to be suitable for a population with limited proprioceptive skills, high dependency rate, and limited cognitive skills. Focus for design was on designing feedback that would allow the inpat...

Cancer Research UK (CRUK) wants people to “show us your fight face” by posting their selfies on Twitter to raise money for its “life-saving research to bring forward the day when all cancers are cured.” In Glasgow, earlier this year, an advertising agency working for the Beatson Cancer Centre declared on billboards, “Be full of hope. Be courageous. Be ready to fight,” adding that it was “determ...