In an earlier paper the notion of a ray guard, a guard that can only see along a single ray, was introduced. Ray guarding means siting the fewest possible guards that guard all adjacencies (shared edges or parts of edges) in an orthogonal arrangement of adjacent nonoverlapping rectangles. In the earlier paper the problem was restricted by requiring that the direction of sight be parallel to one...

Like humans engaged in risky activities, group members of some animal societies take turns acting as sentinels. Explanations of the evolution of sentinel behavior have frequently relied on kin selection or reciprocal altruism, but recent models suggest that guarding may be an individual's optimal activity once its stomach is full if no other animal is on guard. This paper provides support for t...

Functional coupling, where a single morphological trait performs multiple functions, is a universal feature of organismal design. Theory suggests that functional coupling may constrain the rate of phenotypic evolution, yet empirical tests of this hypothesis are rare. In fish, the evolutionary transition from guarding the eggs on a sandy/rocky substrate (i.e. substrate guarding) to mouthbrooding...

Males frequently remain in close proximity to their mate immediately postcopulation. This behavior has generally been interpreted as a guarding tactic designed to reduce the likelihood that a rival male can rapidly displace the ejaculate of the guarding male [1, 2]. Such attempts by males to control their mates represent a potential source of conflict [3-5], but guarding behaviors in species wh...

BACKGROUND Guarding pain after rat plantar incision is similar to pain at rest in postoperative patients. Spontaneous activity (SA) in nociceptive pathways quite likely transmits such ongoing pain. This study examined the extent of tissue injury by incision on pain behaviors and nociceptor SA. METHODS Rat pain behaviors were measured after a sham procedure, skin incision, or skin plus deep ti...

BACKGROUND Nerve injury and consequent inflammatory responses produced by surgical incision result in a complicated pain status which still affects half of all surgical patients. Therefore, it is essential for anesthesiologists to identify the mechanisms of postoperative pain. Mast cells are resident cells of connective tissue and the mucosa that participate in the immune response. Degranulatio...

This paper describes a database management system (DBMS) modified to use hardware write protection to guard critical DBMS data structures against software errors. Guarding (write-protecting) DBMS data improves software reliability by providing quick detection of corrupted pointers and array bounds overruns. Guarding will be especially helpful in an extensible DBMS since it limits the power of e...

The powerful illusion of a unified, Cartesian self responsible for intentional action is contrasted with the biologically sounder model of competitive processes that yield an only partially coherent agency, and the existence of the illusion of self is explained as an evolved feature of communicating agents, capable of responding to requests and queries about their own decisions and actions.

BACKGROUND Studies on postoperative pain examine the etiology of incisional pain with the goal to develop new treatments for patients' pain after surgery. The current study examined the analgesic effects of a recently developed transient receptor potential vanilloid 1 (TRPV1) antagonist, AMG0347, on incisional pain in rats. Doses of morphine lower than those used in most rodent studies were als...