No abstract

The mission of the European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI), an outstation of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) in Heidelberg, is to ensure that the growing body of information from molecular biology and genome research is placed in the public domain and is accessible freely to all parts of the scientific community in ways that promote scientific progress. To fulfil this mission, the EBI provides a wide variety of free, publicly available bioinformatics services. These can be divided into data submissions processing; access to query, analysis and retrieval systems and tools; ftp downloads of software and databases; training and education and user support. All of these services are available at the EBI website: http://www.ebi.ac.uk/services. This paper provides a detailed introduction to the interactive analysis systems that are available from the EBI and a brief introduction to other, related services.

We use the group of Abelian surfaces to develop a gauge-independent quantization for the two-index antisymmetric potential. An exact solution is found for the vacuum and the photon state, and a regularization scheme is proposed.

We propose a definition of classical differential cross sections for particles with essentially nonplanar orbits, such as spinning ones. We give also a method for its computation. The calculations are carried out explicitly for electromagnetic, gravitational, and short-range scalar interactions up to the linear terms in the slow-motion approximation. The contribution of the spin-spin terms is found to be at best times the post-Newtonian ones for the gravitational interaction.