Elephants and Kings: An Environmental History

A comprehensive genomic history of extinct and living elephants.

Elephantids are the world's most iconic megafaunal family, yet there is no comprehensive genomic assessment of their relationships. We report a total of 14 genomes, including 2 from the American mastodon, which is an extinct elephantid relative, and 12 spanning all three extant and three extinct elephantid species including an ∼120,000-y-old straight-tusked elephant, a Columbian mammoth, and wo...

On the 3-kings and 4-kings in multipartite tournaments

Koh and Tan gave a sufficient condition for a 3-partite tournament to have at least one 3-king in [K.M. Koh, B.P. Tan, Kings in multipartite tournaments, Discrete Math. 147 (1995) 171–183, Theorem 2]. In Theorem 1 of this paper, we extend this result to n-partite tournaments, where n 3. In [K.M. Koh, B.P. Tan, Number of 4-kings in bipartite tournaments with no 3-kings, Discrete Math. 154 (1996)...

Rainfall and Dragon-Kings

Previous studies have found broad distributions, resembling power laws for different measures of the size of rainfall events. We investigate the large-event tail of these distributions and find in one measure that tropical cyclones account for a large proportion of the very largest events outside the scaling regime, i.e., beyond the cutoff of the power law. Tropical cyclones are sufficiently ra...

Kings and Charisma, Lincoln and Leadership: An Evolutionary Perspective

14 - Of Kings and Capitals

ALAN L. KOLATA Cities, and the larger political formations within which they are embedded, are dynamic congeries of political, economic, and social institutions that are shaped and reshaped by historical circumstance. This dynamism and mutability in the face of exogenou-s forces might suggest the impossibility of a coherent, general theory about the forms and forces of urban transformation of t...