Suzhou is one of China's most famous ancient cities. It is a city steeped in history with a rich ancient culture and is famous for its scenic spots, water canals, and its traditional Chinese rock and water gardens. With 35 km of waterways and rivers criss-crossing the city, it is often referred to as the "Venice of the East". Bordering Shanghai on the east, Wuxi City on the west, Zhejiang Provi...

Asplenium nidus is an epiphytic fern with large simple leaves. Because A. nidus lacks the good taxonomic characters available for species recognition, multiple cryptic species may exist within A. nidus. In Mt. Halimun National Park, West Java, Indonesia, three rbcL sequence types of A. nidus were recorded. All plants regardless of rbcL sequence were 2n = 144. Crossing experiments among these rb...

Previous studies of the genetic landscape of Ireland have suggested homogeneity, with population substructure undetectable using single-marker methods. Here we have harnessed the haplotype-based method fineSTRUCTURE in an Irish genome-wide SNP dataset, identifying 23 discrete genetic clusters which segregate with geographical provenance. Cluster diversity is pronounced in the west of Ireland bu...

A multi-disciplinary project lead by the U.S. Geological Survey is currently studying the fringing reef off southern Molokai, Hawaii, in an effort to characterize the biological structure and geologic variability of coral reef systems. Wave modeling and field observations were utilized to help understand the physical controls on reef morphology and the distribution of coral species. The morphol...

The bonga shad, Ethmalosa fimbriata, is a West African pelagic species still abundant in most habitats of its distribution range and thought to be only recently affected by anthropogenic pressure (habitat destruction or fishing pressure). Its presence in a wide range of coastal habitats characterised by different hydrodynamic processes, represents a case study useful for evaluating the importan...

This paper presents the application of metaheuristic methods to the minimum crossing number problem for the first time. These algorithms including particle swarm optimization, improved ray optimization, colliding bodies optimization and enhanced colliding bodies optimization. For each method, a pseudo code is provided. The crossing number problem is NP-hard and has important applications in eng...

The number of selectively neutral polymorphic sites in a random sample of genes can be affected by ancestral selectively favored substitutions at linked loci. The degree to which this happens depends on when in the history of the sample the selected substitutions happen, the strength of selection and the amount of crossing over between the sampled locus and the loci at which the selected substi...

In this correspondence, we present new results on the reconstruction of two-dimensional signals from zero crossing or threshold crossing information. Specifically, we develop new theoretical results which state conditions under which two-dimensional bandlimited signals are uniquely specified to within a scale factor with this information. Unlike previous results in this area, our new results do...

Let Rn = max0≤j≤n Sj − Sn be a random walk Sn reflected in its maximum. We give necessary and sufficient conditions for finiteness of passage times of Rn above horizontal or certain curved (power law) boundaries. Necessary and sufficient conditions are also given for the finiteness of the expected passage time of Rn above linear and square root boundaries. 2000 MSC Subject Classifications: prim...