We present a simple Monte Carlo method for estimating the age of the most recent common ancestor (MRCA) of a sample of DNA sequences. We show that Templeton's (1993) estimator of the age of the MRCA based on the maximum number of nucleotide differences between two sequences in a sample is inaccurate, and we demonstrate the new method by reanalyzing a sample of DNA sequences from human Y chromos...

A feasibility design study was undertaken to assess the requirements of a mid-infrared echelle spectrograph (MIRES) with a resolving power of 120,000 and its associated mid-infrared adaptive optics (MIRAO) system on the Thirty-Meter Telescope. Our baseline design incorporates a 2Kx2K Si:As array or array mosaic for the spectrograph and a 1Kx1K Si:As array for the slit viewer. Various tradeoffs ...

Branching process in random environment (BPRE) are a generalization of GaltonWatson processes where the reproduction law is picked randomly in an i.i.d manner in each generation. In the supercritical case, the population Zn either explodes (with a positive probability) or becomes extincted. We are interested in the event when the process Zn takes positive but bounded values for large times n. W...

We report on the generation of narrowband carrier-envelope phase stable mid-infrared (MIR) pulses between 10 and 15 μm. High pulse energies and narrow bandwidths are required for the selective nonlinear excitation of collective modes of matter that is not possible with current sources. We demonstrate bandwidths of <2% at 12.5 μm wavelength through difference frequency generation between two nea...

Alternative splicing (AS) plays important roles in many plant functions, but its conservation across the plant kingdom is not known. We describe a methodology to identify AS events and identify conserved AS events across large phylogenetic distances using RNA-Seq datasets. We applied this methodology to transcriptome data from nine angiosperms including Amborella, the single sister species to a...

the present study investigates the effect of different exposure densities on third grade iranian junior high school (ijhs) students’ efl development and retention. it also attempts to explore whether there is any differential performance due to type of post-exposure assessment tasks (recognition vs. written production). performances of five groups of learners receiving equal amount of exposure ...

Evaluation of volcanic and hydrothermal fluxes to the surface environments is important to elucidate the geochemical cycle of sulphur and the evolution of ocean chemistry. This paper presents S/(3)He ratios of vesicles in mid-ocean ridge (MOR) basalt glass together with the ratios of high-temperature hydrothermal fluids to calculate the sulphur flux of 100 Gmol/y at MOR. The S/(3)He ratios of h...

Universally conserved positions in ribosomal proteins have significant biases in amino acid usage, likely indicating the expansion of the genetic code at the time leading up to the most recent common ancestor(s) (MRCA). Here, we apply this principle to the evolutionary history of the ribosome before the MRCA. It has been proposed that the experimentally determined order of assembly for ribosoma...

The mid-Pliocene Warm Period (mPWP) offers an opportunity to understand a warmer-than-present world and assess the predictive ability of numerical climate models. Environmental reconstruction and climate modelling are crucial for understanding the mPWP, and the synergy of these two, often disparate, fields has proven essential in confirming features of the past and in turn building confidence i...

We consider a stationary continuous model of random size population with non-neutral mutations using a continuous state branching process with non-homogeneous immigration. We assume the type (or mutation) of the immigrants is random given by a constant mutation rate measure. We determine some genealogical properties of this process such as: distribution of the time to the most recent common anc...