  An updated and improved version of the effective interaction based on the
Argonne\textendash Urbana nuclear Hamiltonian\textemdash derived using the
formalism of Correlated Basis Functions (CBF) and the cluster expansion
technique\textemdash is employed to obtain a number of properties of cold
nuclear matter at arbitrary neutron excess within the formalism of many-body
perturbation theory. The numerical results\textemdash including the
ground-state energy per nucleon, the symmetry energy, the pressure, the
compressibility, and the single-particle spectrum\textemdash are discussed in
the context of the available empirical information, obtained from measured
nuclear properties and heavy-ion collisions.
