Patterns of spatial variation in biological diversity represent one of the central themes in modern biogeography and ecology (Rosenzweig, 1995; Gaston & Williams, 1996). Much of the knowledge about these patterns available to date is based strictly on studies of free-living organisms (Rosenzweig, 1995), whereas patterns of parasite diversity have until now attracted Ramon Science Center and Mit...

[1] Soil sulfates are present in arid and hyperarid environments on Earth and have been found to be abundant in soils on Mars. Examination of soil gypsum from the Atacama Desert, Chile, the Mojave Desert, United States, and Al-Jafr Basin, Jordan, revealed endolithic cyanobacteria communities just below the surface of soil gypsum samples. Optical and scanning electron microscope observations of ...

Receptor of Hedgehog ligands but lacks the strong capacity of PTCH1 to inhibit the signaling molecule Smoothened, which, through a series of intracellular events, activates the GLI family of transcription factors. Thus, while PTCH1 regulates Smoothened activity depending on Hedgehog ligand binding, PTCH2 is not. This is despite the fact that the three mammalian Hedgehog ligands Sonic, Desert an...

Palynomorphs extracted from the mud coffins and plant remains preserved at the archaeological site of Xiaohe Cemetery (Cal. 3980 to 3540 years BP) in Lop Nur Desert of Xinjiang, China were investigated for the reconstruction of the ancient environments at the site. The results demonstrate that the Xiaohe People lived at a well-developed oasis, which was surrounded by extensive desert. The veget...

We introduce the notion of nested distance desert automata as a joint generalization and further development of distance automata and desert automata. We show that limitedness of nested distance desert automata is PSPACE-complete. As an application, we show that it is decidable in 22 O(n2) space whether the language accepted by an n-state non-deterministic automaton is of a star height less tha...

An important bottleneck in model-based design of embedded systems is the cost of constructing models. This cost can be significantly decreased by increasing the reuse of existing model components in the design process. This paper describes a tool suite, which has been developed for component-based model synthesis. The DESERT tool suite can be interfaced to existing modeling and analysis environ...

Because cutaneous water loss (CWL) represents half of total water loss in birds, selection to reduce CWL may be strong in desert birds. We previously found that CWL of house sparrows from a desert population was about 25% lower than that of individuals from a mesic environment. The stratum corneum (SC), the outer layer of the epidermis, serves as the primary barrier to water vapor diffusion thr...

persian gazelle, gazella subgutturosa, exists throughout arid and semiarid regions of iran and has a key role in these frail ecosystems. habitat degradation and population decline has placed it on the list of vulnerable species in 2008. the phylogenetic relationships of three persian gazelle populations in the central part of iran (i.e. ghamishlou national park and wildlife refuge, mouteh wildl...

lut 009 meteorite was found during a trip to lut desert of iran in march,2012, at 30°20.38' n, 59°09.04' e. chemical compositions of equilibrated olivine (fa19.3 ± 0.5) and orthopyroxene (fs16.7 ± 0.6) show that the meteorite sample belongs to h group of ordinary chondrites, while the texture (chondrule petrography and plagioclase size) suggests a petrologic type of 4. the lut 009 has...