The latest reviews:

6/15 people found the following review useful:

Article Title and Code: Desperately Seeking Superstrings, oai:arXiv.org:physics/9403001
Reviewer: truth2k
Evaluation:
Date: September 19, 2006
Review Title: Paul Ginspaug Knows the Reason!

Review:

His words about string are very accurate, which apply to Big Bang too.

Was this a useful review?

6/11 people found the following review useful:

Article Title and Code: Berezinskii-Kosterlitz-Thouless Crossover in a Trapped Atomic Gas, oai:arXiv.org:cond-mat/0605291
Reviewer: Drew
Evaluation: 5
Date: September 14, 2006
Review Title: Beautiful!

Review:

This is an absolutely beautiful experiment!

Was this a useful review?

14/15 people found the following review useful:

Article Title and Code: Desperately Seeking Superstrings, oai:arXiv.org:physics/9403001
Reviewer: bojan
Evaluation: 5
Date: July 08, 2006
Review Title: The more things change, the more they remain the same.

Review:

This article, written in 1986 and first appearing in an issue of Physics Today, is as relevant today as it was twenty years ago. The Physics went horribly wrong a few decades ago, and to this day there seems no way out of the woods. We can only hope that this article will not be equally pertinent in 2026.

Was this a useful review?

14/14 people found the following review useful:

Article Title and Code: The electronic structure of liquid water within density functional theory, oai:arXiv.org:cond-mat/0502008
Reviewer: naromero
Evaluation: 5
Date: June 30, 2006
Review Title: Intersting results for DFT studies of disordered systems

Review:

The work presented here has interesting results with important consequences for those interested in the simulation of water using ab initio methods. The main result is that the unoccopied states in liquid water (an aperiodic system) exhibits a much large finite-size effect than the occupied states. This was demonstrated for unit cells containing 32 and 256 molecules. However, there are a few issues that this reviewer believes did not sufficient attention. For example, 1. The origin of thise finite-size effect was never explained only that it exists with the pseudopotential PW approach. Perhaps, this is not surprise because DFT is a groundstate theory.(The authors of this article state that there is no reason to even trust the unoccupied spectrum.) 2. On page 2 of the article, the authors state that: "We test whether the EDOS computed using a 32 molecule supercell with 8 k-points is an accurate approximation of the EDOS computed using a 256 molecule supercell with 1 k-point. Such calculations would yield identical results for a periodic crystal; however, for a disordered phase like liquid water this equivalence is destroyed." Meaning that in a mathematically formal sense one is comparing apples and oranges. The continue and say further on, "Yet, at 300 K the differences are small, and we find that increased k-point sampling in smaller supercells is indeed an accurate approximation of the EDOS of much larger liquid water systems." So there results may not be general, would this be true at higher temperatures for example. 3. For the DFT protion of the calculations, three different codes are used: GP, ABINIT, & PWSCF. Obviously there is no single code that implements every needed feature, however one should always be very cautious when comparing results between codes because there are are always differences in implementation which could lead to systematic error. In this article, this reviewer believes that the authors were very carefully in eliminating systematic errors, nonetheless it is not an optimal situation to be using so many different DFT codes in a comparison.

Was this a useful review?

12/12 people found the following review useful:

Article Title and Code: Collective evolution and the genetic code, oai:arXiv.org:q-bio/0605036
Reviewer: mhgarci1
Evaluation: 4
Date: June 30, 2006
Review Title:

Review:

The authors present a compelling explanation for the universality and optimality of the genetic code. Under this explanation, rather than being a result of a “frozen accident”, these two characteristics are a necessary consequence of rampant, widespread Horizontal Gene Transfer (HGT) and other means of sharing innovation, plus a competition among different protocols. The advantage of modularity in this continuous exchange of innovation would favour the functional separation of the translational machinery and the code specificators, and be consistent with the translation mechanism being more conserved evolutionarily. This scenario is coherent and the ideas exposed far reaching. The simulations included convincingly prove the point that innovation sharing would lead to both universality and optimality of the code. I only have a couple of major comments. The first one is that although the scenario as presented here seems highly appealing, such a dramatic communal evolution should surely have further observable consequences that can be tackled experimentally to prove further evidence. The second one is that, well, any smart scientist can cook up a model that has just the precise elements to lead to his conclusions. The harder part is to show that it is those included elements that are dominant in the system and drive it. In the case of evolutionary problems like this it is, of course, impossible to make a direct check, and this brings up my previous point that such a different approach from the “frozen accident” consensus should be able to provide a hoard of testable consequences to prove its applicability. I imagine the authors are working on it. Some minor points that could improve the manuscript include: -) A reference would be very welcome for the “Mechanisms internal to the cell include change in tRNA expression levels.... as is known to occur though variations in Mg concentrations.....” (Page 4 first paragraph). -) The definition of site type s(x) is never given in page 6 (first paragraph in right column). What is a site type? I have an intuitive idea, but an explicit definition would help.

Was this a useful review?

Previous 1 2 3 4 5 Next