1. Recent studies in Scotland suggest that the outermost tail feathers of Barn Swallows ( Hirundo rustica Linnaeus) may be around 10–12 mm longer than the aerodynamic optimum, with sexual selection for long tails accounting for this extra length. 2. To test this hypothesis, we shortened the outermost tail feathers in male and female Barn Swallows in southern Spain by cutting 1, 11 or 21 mm from...

Development of autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) which meets the design constraints and provides the best hydrodynamic performance is really an important challenge in the field of hydrodynamics. In this paper a new profile is used for designing the hull of AUVs. The nose and tail profiles of an AUV using presented profile is designed such that it can properly consider the length constraints...

In this paper, we study the tail behavior of the stationary queue length of an M/G/1 retrial queue. We show that the subexponential tail of the stationary queue length of an M/G/1 retrial queue is determined by that of the corresponding M/G/1 queue, and hence the stationary queue length in an M/G/1 retrial queue is subexponential if the stationary queue length in the corresponding M/G/1 queue i...

The biogenesis of connexins and their assembly into functional gap junction hemichannels (connexons) was studied with the use of a cell-free transcription/translation system. Velocity sedimentation on sucrose gradients showed that a small proportion of connexin (Cx) 26 and Cx32 that were co-translationally translocated into microsomes were oligomers of Cx26 and Cx32. Chemical cross-linking stud...

forty-nine preserved specimens (31 male and 18 female) of trachylepis aurata transcaucsasica were examined with respect to metric and meristic features and dry skull anatomy to assess sexual dimorphism. thirty-one morphological characters and 36 anatomical characters in dry skulls were examined. subdigital lamellae under the forth toe, neck length, neck length/snout vent length, and six skull c...

Allometric growth pattern and body shape changes of the Green terror (Andinoacara rivulatus)(Cichlidae) were studied using landmark-based geometric morphometric (GM) and traditional methods, from hatching up to 1266 Hours Post Hatching (HPH) under culture conditions. The left side of specimens were photographed using digital camera and morphometric characters, including total length, head lengt...

The fixed-rate entropy-constrained vector quantizer draws its motivation from the large gap in the performance of the optimal entropy-constrained scalar quantizer (ESCQ) and the fixed-rate LMQ for most non-uniform sources and tries to bridge this gap while maintaining a fixed-rate output. Having a fixed-rate output avoids all problems associated with a variable rate output such as error propaga...