Earth is much more complex than all the other solar system objects that we know. Thanks to its rich and diverse geology, our planet can offer habitats to a wide range of living species. Emerging insights suggest that this is not just a happy coincidence, but that life itself has in many ways helped to shape the planet.

With the explosive growth of multimedia data, video presentation has become an important technology for fast browsing of video content. In this paper, we present a novel video presentation technique called “Free-Shaped Video Collage” (FS-Collage), which is motivated from and built upon our previous work on Video Collage [3]. Video Collage is a kind of static summary which selects the most repre...

The existence of abnormal-shaped menisci has been long recognized. The presence of discoid menisci in the human knee is considered to be a congenital malformation with a very low rate of incidence except in Asian populations. Since the publication of Watanabe's Atlas, three types of lateral meniscal abnormalities are generally accepted: the complete and incomplete discoid, as well as the Wrisbe...

Since the systematic evolution of graph-like program models has become important in software engineering, graph transformation has gained much attention in this area. For specifying model evolution concisely, graph transformation rules should be as expressive as possible. The generic rules proposed in this paper may contain placeholders for graphs of varying number and shape. Expansion of these...

The present review deals with the preparation and the properties of star-shaped conjugated compounds. Three, four or six conjugated arms are attached to crossconjugated cores, which consist of single atoms (B, C, N), benzene or azine rings or polycyclic ring systems, as for example triphenylene or tristriazolotriazine. Many of these shape-persistent [n]star compounds tend to -stacking and self...

A 20-year-old male with intracerebral bleeding due to a motor vehicle accident as the cause of death became a multiorgan donor. He did not have any notable medical history including pancreas disease. The pancreas was procured en bloc with the spleen and duodenum at a distant hospital and shipped to our institute for the purpose of islet isolation and transplantation. During a routine preparatio...

The architectural design of systems deals with the high level structuring of configurations. Checking that a system belongs to an architectural style (or shape) implies that the architecture is an instance of a structurally defined class. On the other side, hierarchies allow modeling at different levels of detail: subsystems may be represented as single components to abstract structure and beha...

With the tremendous advancements in wireless communications, there is an increasing demand for miniature, low-cost, easy-to-fabricate, multiband and wideband antennas for use in commercial communications systems. As a part of an effort to further enhance modern communications systems technology, researchers have been studying different approaches for creating novel and innovative antennas. The ...

The space-time focusing of a (continuous) succession of localized X-shaped pulses is obtained by suitably integrating over their speed, i.e., over their axicon angle, thus generalizing a previous (discrete) approach. New superluminal wave pulses are first constructed and then tailored so that they become temporally focused at a chosen spatial point, where the wave field can reach very high inte...

We introduce k-star-shaped polygons, polygons for which there exists at least one point x such that for any point y of the polygon, segment xy crosses the polygon’s boundary at most k times. The set of all such points x is called the k-kernel of the polygon. We show that the maximum complexity (number of vertices) of the k-kernel of an n-vertex polygon is Θ(n) if k = 2 and Θ(n) if k ≥ 4. We giv...