A search was undertaken for bacteria which degrade chondroitin sulfate in nature and to find bacteria with a usefully high rate of chondroitinase (ChSase) productivity. First, 253 ChSase-producing bacteria were obtained from aquatic and land environments in Japan by aerobic and anaerobic screening methods. Identification according to Bergey's Manual of Determinative Bacteriology or Bain and She...

Anthropogenic habitat modification often has a profound negative impact on the flora and fauna of an ecosystem. In parts of the Middle East, ephemeral rivers (wadis) are characterised by stands of acacia trees. Green, flourishing assemblages of these trees are in decline in several countries, most likely due to human-induced water stress and habitat changes. We examined the importance of health...

Abstract. Image restoration tasks are ill-posed problems, typically solved with priors. Since the optimal prior is the exact unknown density of natural images, actual priors are only approximate and typically restricted to small patches. This raises several questions: How much may we hope to improve current restoration results with future sophisticated algorithms? And more fundamentally, even w...

Empirical data for several ecological systems suggest that how resource availability scales with patch geometry may influence the outcome of species interactions. To study this process, we assume a pseudoequilibrium to reduce the dimensionality of a two-consumer-two-resource model in which different resources are available in the interior of a patch versus at the edge. We analyze the resulting ...

Habitat fragmentation can cause population declines greater than those expected from habitat loss alone. This can result from detrimental ‘‘edge effects’’, which occur when predation rates are higher at habitat edges relative to interiors. The marbled murrelet (Brachyramphus marmoratus) is a threatened seabird which nests in old-growth forests, a habitat that is being fragmented by ongoing harv...

In this paper, natural frequencies of the sandwich plates with soft flexible core and composite face sheets are obtained. Three-Dimensional (3D) finite element method (FEM) is used for constructing and analyzing of the sandwich plates to obtain their natural frequencies. Continuity conditions for transverse shear stresses at the interfaces as well as transverse flexibility and transverse normal...