Fire disasters were a major threat to eighteenth-century villages and towns. Following such conflagrations, writers, artists, publishers eager represent the disaster in great detail. Printed poems pamphlets did not only describe flames’ destruction, but also put emphasis on solidarity during after catastrophe. The risks of looting social disorder acknowledged by authors, received little attenti...

Many countries rely heavily on patients' out-of-pocket payments to providers to finance their health care systems. This prevents some people from seeking care and results in financial catastrophe and impoverishment for others who do obtain care. Surveys in eighty-nine countries covering 89 percent of the world's population suggest that 150 million people globally suffer financial catastrophe an...

This paper addresses some mathematical problems arising from the infrared (IR) catastrophe in quantum field theory. IR catastrophe is formulated and studied in operator theory, characterized by the Carleman operator. Non-existence of ground state under IR catastrophe is also investigated with the help of the characterization. The theory presented in this paper is applied to the Hamiltonian of t...

Many global catastrophic risks threaten major disruption to global food supplies, including nuclear wars, volcanic eruptions, asteroid and comet impacts, and plant disease outbreaks. This paper discusses options for increasing the resilience of food supplies to these risks. In contrast with local catastrophes, global food supply catastrophes cannot be addressed via food aid from external locati...

Aneuploidy is frequently detected in human cancers and is implicated in carcinogenesis. Pharmacologic targeting of aneuploidy is an attractive therapeutic strategy, as this would preferentially eliminate malignant over normal cells. We previously discovered that CDK2 inhibition causes lung cancer cells with more than two centrosomes to undergo multipolar cell division leading to apoptosis, defi...

The G(2) DNA damage checkpoint is activated by genotoxic agents and is particularly important for cancer therapies. Overriding the checkpoint can trigger precocious entry into mitosis, causing cells to undergo mitotic catastrophe. But some checkpoint-abrogated cells can remain viable and progress into G(1) phase, which may contribute to further genome instability. Our previous studies reveal th...

Genotoxic stress such as ionizing radiation halts entry into mitosis by activation of the G(2) DNA damage checkpoint. The CHK1 inhibitor 7-hydroxystaurosporine (UCN-01) can bypass the checkpoint and induce unscheduled mitosis in irradiated cells. Precisely, how cells behave following checkpoint abrogation remains to be defined. In this study, we tracked the fates of individual cells after check...

Catastrophe theory is a mathematical formalism for modeling nonlinear systems whose discontinuous behavior is determined by smooth changes in a small number of driving parameters. Fitting a catastrophe model to noisy data constitutes a serious challenge, however, because catastrophe theory was formulated specifically for deterministic systems. Loren Cobb addressed this challenge by developing a...

Recent developments in computer technology have significantly altered the way the insurance business functions. Easy access to large quantities of data has rendered some traditional ratemaking limitations obsolete. The emergence of catastrophe simulation using computer modeling has helped actuaries develop new methods for measuring catastrophe risk and providing for it in insurance rates. This ...