New interactions with non-native species can alter selection pressures on native species. Here, we examined the effect of the spatial distribution of a non-native species, a factor that determines ecological and evolutionary outcomes but that is poorly understood, particularly on a fine scale. Specifically, we explored a native butterfly population and a non-native plant on which the butterfly ...

Habitat fragmentation is a major driver of biodiversity loss. Yet, the overall effects of fragmentation on biodiversity may be obscured by differences in responses among species. These opposing responses to fragmentation may be manifest in higher variability in species richness and abundance (termed hyperdynamism), and in predictable changes in community composition. We tested whether forest fr...

Concerns about the potential toxicity of pollen from genetically modified maize on neighbouring butterflies prompted urgent studies, reports Nigel Williams.

That the flap of a butterfly’s wing might lead to a storm or other event halfway around the globe is a popular image used to introduce chaos theory. But two small lepidopterans appear to have played a major part in the scrapping of plans to build a new nuclear power station on a shingle bank in the south-east of England, which is becoming an increasing focus in the International Year of Biodive...

The paper introduces the butterfly factorization as a data-sparse approximation for the matrices that satisfy a complementary low-rank property. The factorization can be constructed efficiently if either fast algorithms for applying the matrix and its adjoint are available or the entries of the matrix can be sampled individually. For an N ×N matrix, the resulting factorization is a product of O...

BACKGROUND Over the past 50 years, Southeast Asia has suffered the greatest losses of biodiversity of any tropical region in the world. Malaysia is a biodiversity hotspot in the heart of Southeast Asia with roughly the same number of mammal species, three times the number of butterfly species, but only 4% of the land area of Australia. Consequently, in Malaysia, there is an urgent need for biod...

In this paper, a new concept of integration of fractal and the butterfly effect is proposed and implemented. A new fractal program was designed and developed to perform such integration. Among many existing fractal and chaos software programs, none of them allow us to achieve the resulting patterns demonstrated in this paper. Moreover, it is the first time that a fractal program provides functi...

Evolutionary search has been extensively used to generate artistic images. Raw images have high dimensionality which makes a direct search for an image challenging. In previous work this problem has been addressed by using compact symbolic encodings or by constraining images with priors. Recent developments in deep learning have enabled a generation of compelling artistic images using generativ...

UFR-STAPS, Laboratoire de Recherche “Adaptations Physiologiques à L’Exercice et Réadaptation à L’Effort”, Université de Picardie Jules Verne, Amiens, France, 2 School of Sport, Exercise and Health Sciences, Peter Harrison Centre for Disability Sport, Loughborough University, Loughborough, UK, 3 European Research Group in Disability Sport, Loughborough, UK, 4 Amsterdam Rehabilitation Research Ce...

There is a discrepancy in the literature as to whether fasting during Ramadan affects athletic performance. We suggest in this letter that the time frame for training is a confounding variable that has been missed in the literature.