It has often been suggested that the genome sizes of birds are constrained relative to other tetrapods owing to the high metabolic demands of powered flight and the link between nuclear DNA content and red blood cell size. This hypothesis predicts that hummingbirds, which engage in energy-intensive hovering flight, will display especially constrained genomes even relative to other birds. We rep...

A very small fraction of the proteins required for the propagation and function of mitochondria are coded by their genomes, while nuclear genes code the vast majority. We studied the migration of genes between the two genomes when transfer mechanisms mediate this exchange. We could calculate the influence of differential mutation rates, as well as that of biased transfer rates, on the partition...

In many microarray studies, a cluster defined on one dataset is sought in an independent dataset. If the cluster is found in the new dataset, the cluster is said to be "reproducible" and may be biologically significant. Classifying a new datum to a previously defined cluster can be seen as predicting which of the previously defined clusters is most similar to the new datum. If the new data clas...

We use semi-analytic models implemented in the Millennium Simulation to analyze the merging histories of dark matter haloes and of the galaxies that reside in them. We assume that supermassive black holes only exist in galaxies that have experienced at least one major merger. Only a few percent of galaxies with stellar masses less than M∗ < 10 10M⊙ are predicted to have experienced a major merg...

Three cases of the mosquito-borne Zika virus have been confirmed in the western Indian state of Gujarat, the World Health Organization has said, adding that efforts should be made to strengthen surveillance. The cases, which included a 34 year old woman who had just given birth and a pregnant 22 year old, were detected during random testing from November 2016 to February this year in Gujarat’s ...

When discussing the convergence properties of the Lanczos iteration method for the real symmetric eigenvalue problem, Trefethen and Bau noted that the Lanczos method tends to find eigenvalues in regions that have too little charge when compared to an equilibrium distribution. In this paper a quantitative version of this rule of thumb is presented. We describe, in an asymptotic sense, the region...