The efficacy of any animal signal is constrained by the range over which it remains above the sensory threshold of potential receivers. The spatial area in which reliable detection occurs defines active space; this is influenced by signal structure, the signalling environment and the sensory characteristics of receivers. Identification of the factors influencing active space has provided valuab...

In this paper, we establish connections between the thresholds and mechanisms of the damage and white-light generation upon femtosecond laser irradiation of wide-bandgap transparent materials. On the example of Corning Willow glass, evolution of ablation craters, their quality, and white-light emission were studied experimentally for 130-fs, 800-nm laser pulses. The experimental results indicat...

The ETICA project aims to identify emerging information and communication technologies. These technologies are then analysed and evaluated from an ethical perspective. The aim of this analysis is to suggest possible governance arrangements that will allow paying proactive attention to such ethical issues. During the ETICA workshop at the summer school, participants were asked to choose one of t...

This paper presents a unique flywheel-based regenerative energy recovery, storage and release system developed at the author’s laboratory. It can recover and store regenerative energy produced by braking a motion generator with intermittent rotary velocity such as the rotor of a wind turbogenerator subject to intermittent intake wind and the axels of electric and hybrid gas-electric vehicles du...

Streak breakdown caused by a spanwise in ectional instability is one phase of the following transition scenarios, which occur in plane Poiseuille and Couette ow. The streamwise vortex scenario is described by (SV) streamwise vortices =) streamwise streaks =) streak breakdown =) transition: The oblique wave scenario is described by (OW) oblique waves =) streamwise vortices =) streamwise streaks ...

We provide a complete description of the critical threshold phenomena for the two-dimensional localized Euler-Poisson equations, introduced by the authors in [17]. Here, the questions of global regularity vs. finite-time breakdown for the 2D Restricted Euler-Poisson solutions are classified in terms of precise explicit formulae, describing a remarkable variety of critical threshold surfaces of ...

Motivated by recent experiments on the finite temperature Mott transition in VO(2) films, we propose a classical coarse-grained dielectric breakdown model where each degree of freedom represents a nanograin which transitions from insulator to metal with increasing temperature and voltage at random thresholds due to quenched disorder. We describe the properties of the resulting nonequilibrium me...

We present a method for visualizing the important adaptive dynamics in evolving systems. The method consists of measuring evolutionary activity, (as conceived by Bedau and Packard) of components of evolving systems and then plotting this as a function of time. This method has already been applied to individual alleles and whole genotypes. We extend the method to phenotypically equivalent types ...

It is well-documented that the intensity of a self-generated somatosensory stimulus is perceived to be attenuated in respect to an identical stimulus generated by others. At present, it is not clear whether such a phenomenon, known as somatosensory attenuation, is based not only on feedforward motor signals but also on re-afferences towards the body. To answer this question, in the present pilo...

We show that depending on the disorder, a small noise added to the threshold distribution of the fuse network may or may not completely change the subsequent breakdown process. When the threshold distribution has a lower cutoff at a finite value and a power law dependence towards large thresholds with an exponent which is less than 0.16 ± 0.03, the network is not sensitive to the added noise, o...