soil salinity poses considerable and increasing problems for agriculture, and is receiving much attention from plant breeders. the identification of genes whose expression enables plants to adapt to and/or tolerate salt stress is essential for breeding programs, but little is known about the genetic mechanisms of traits in saline conditions. the data obtained from 75 families produced by crossi...

Energy allocation among somatic maintenance, reproduction and growth varies not only among species, but among individuals according to states such as age, sex and season. Little research has been conducted on the somatic (physiological) maintenance of long-lived organisms, particularly ectotherms such as reptiles. In this study, we examined sex differences and age- and season-related variation ...

Bipedal robots are diicult to analyze mathematically. However, successful control strategies can be discovered using simple physical intuition and can be described in simple terms. Five things have to happen for a planar bipedal robot to walk. Height has to be stabilized. Pitch has to be stabilized. Speed has to be stabilized. The swing leg has to move so that the feet are in locations which al...

This article describes a mechanical vertical attenuation system capable to provide large attenuation factors above 1Hz. This system is derived from, and improves, the passive Geometric Anti-Spring seismic attenuation filters minimizing their vertical resonant frequency by means of a tunable electromagnetic spring mounted in parallel with the main spring. The tunable spring is also used to compe...

According to optimal foraging theory the prey choice strongly affects the benefitcost ratios. Predators search prey giving the highest benefit and costs of all components of predation (i.e. prey search, encounter, pursuit, capture, and handling) may be considerably reduced if the prey is more available. The study on Cormorant diet and the species composition of prey fish assemblages in the Dobc...

Dissolved concentrations of four forms of arsenic: arsenite, arsenate, monomethylarsenic, and dimethylarsenic, were measured in the Patuxent River Estuary near Benedict, Maryland, over two annual cycles. In each year, total arsenic concentrations peaked in the summer, in lateJuly and August, while minimum concentrations occurred in winter. Except in late winter, arsenate was a predominant form ...

Identifying the authorship either of an anonymous or a doubtful document constitutes a cornerstone for automatic forensic applications. Moreover, it is a challenging task for both humans and computers. Clustering documents according to the linguistic style of the authors who wrote them has been a task little studied by the research community. In order to address this problem, PAN Evaluation Fra...

Groups of the Guatemalan black howler monkey (Alouatta pigra) in a fragmented northern Guatemalan cloud forest in the Sierra Yalijux were analyzed for group composition and size using an ornithological census technique. Audio and visual records were combined to estimate each group’s home range size. The 361 observations in 2002 estimated 50 individuals in seven groups. Two home range classes we...