The auricularia larva of sea cucumbers and tornaria larva of acorn worms share striking developmental and morphological similarities. They are regarded as not only an archetype of the nonchordate deuterostome larva, but also an archetype of the origin of chordates. Here we report the characterization and spatial expression patterns of the BMP-2/4 genes of a hemichordate acorn worm (Pf-bmp2/4) a...

The Australian Bureau of Meteorology has recently published a homogenised daily temperature dataset, ACORN-SAT, for the monitoring of climate variability and change in Australia. The dataset employs the latest analysis techniques and takes advantage of newly digitised observational data to provide a daily temperature record over the last 100 years. In this article we present how ACORN-SAT can b...

Whether the highly centralised nervous systems of chordates and protostomes arose from a common ancestral precursor or independently has been a long-standing debate. Now, analysis of neural gene expression in an evolutionarily important chordate outgroup--the sand-dwelling, hemichordate acorn worms--reveals the presence of a central and peripheral nervous system, suggesting a common origin of c...

Elucidating the ecological processes by which adaptive genetic polymorphism is maintained in heterogeneous environments requires knowledge on the spatial scale at which alternate habitats affect genotype-specific fitness. The general objective of this study was to document patterns of temporal and spatial variation of genetic polymorphism in the acorn barnacle (Semibalanus balanoides) at MPI* a...

Using samples from eastern China (c. 25 - 41° N and 99 - 123° E) and from a common garden experiment, we investigate how Mg concentration varies with climate across multiple trophic levels. In soils, plant tissue (Oriental oak leaves and acorns), and a specialist acorn predator (the weevil Curculio davidi), Mg concentration increased significantly with different slopes from south to north, and ...

acorn crop, 79 , 87 , 90 , 92 , 219 , 226 – 228 , 230 – 232 , 232t13.4 acorn woodpecker, 20 , 73 , 190 , 217 – 234 , 263 , 268 , 356 , 359 , 361 , 365t20.1 , 368 Acridotheres tristis . See common myna Acrocephalus melanopogon . See moustached warbler Acrocephalus sechellensis . See Seychelles warbler adaptive delayed dispersal hypothesis, 362 additive care, 158 Aegithalos caudatus . See long-...

A combination of x-ray fluorescence and image processing has been shown to recover text characters written in iron gall ink on parchment, even when obscured by gold paint. Several leaves of the Archimedes Palimpsest were imaged using rapid-scan, x-ray fluorescence imaging performed at the Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Lightsource of the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory. A simple linear sho...

N o area of mathematics has attracted more international attention in the past decade than the Palimpsest of Archimedes. The 1998 auction at Christie’s, followed by collaborative work centered at the Walters Art Museum led to traveling museum exhibits, newspaper articles, television specials, and dozens of presentations. Mathematicians and other scholars attracted a new and significant audience...