BACKGROUND Birds may allocate a significant part of time to comfort behavior (e.g., preening, stretching, shaking, etc.) in order to eliminate parasites, maintain plumage integrity, and possibly reduce muscular ankylosis. Understanding the adaptive value of comfort behavior would benefit from knowledge on the energy costs animals are willing to pay to maintain it, particularly under situations ...

The scale energy budget in the near wall region is a subject of great interest in turbulent flows since it combines concepts from independent analysis in physical space and scale space. Earlier, this energy budget was studied numerically using Direct Numerical Simulation (DNS) data and experimentally using low resolution dual plane Particle Image Velocimetry (PIV) data. It was observed that the...

Establishing satisfactory calculation methods of lake evaporation has been crucial for research and management of water resources and ecosystems. A 30 year dataset from Dickie Lake, south-central Ontario, Canada added to the limited long-term studies on lake evaporation. Evaporation during ice-free season was calculated separately using seven evaporation methods, based on field meteorology, hyd...

The present study examined whether a high tax on high calorie dense foods effectively reduces the purchased calories of high energy dense foods in a web based supermarket, and whether this effect is moderated by budget and weight status. 306 participants purchased groceries in a web based supermarket, with an individualized budget based on what they normally spend. Results showed that relative ...

-In this paper, a fast dynamical multi-objective evolutionary algorithm (DMOEA) based of the principle of the minimal free energy in thermodynamics, was developed to solve mechanical component design problems. Its performance was compared with the ε -constraint method and NSGA-II proposed by Deb et al. Simulation results show that the proposed evolutionary approach produces excellent solutions ...