Most studies of condition-dependent sexual ornaments have treated such ornaments as single traits. However, sexual ornaments are often composites of several components, each produced by partially independent developmental pathways. Depending on environmental and individual condition, components of these ornaments may reflect different behavioral or physiological properties of an individual. One...

Response to habitat fragmentation may not be generalized among species, in particular for plant communities with a variety of dispersal traits. Calcareous grasslands are one of the most species-rich habitats in Central Europe, but abandonment of traditional management has caused a dramatic decline of calcareous grassland species. In the Southern Franconian Alb in Germany, reintroduction of rota...

BACKGROUND High-concentration-capsaicin-patches (Qutenza®) have been put on the market as a treatment for peripheral neuropathic pain. A minimum infrastructure and a determinate skill set for its application are required. Our aim was to assess the feasibility of treatment with high-concentration-capsaicin-patches in clinical practice in a variety of refractory peripheral neuropathic pain syndro...

The total diameter of a closed planar curve C ⊂ R is the integral of its antipodal chord lengths. We show that this quantity is bounded below by twice the area of C. Furthermore, when C is convex or centrally symmetric, the lower bound is twice as large. Both inequalities are sharp and the equality holds in the convex case only when C is a circle. We also generalize these results to m dimension...

Total order multicast greatly simplifies the implementation of fault-tolerant services using the replicated state machine approach. The additional latency of total ordering can be masked by taking advantage of spontaneous ordering observed in LANs: A tentative delivery allows the application to proceed in parallel with the ordering protocol. The effectiveness of the technique rests on the optim...

Random dot kinematograms present a patch of random dots, uniformly displaced from one frame to the next. We have re-examined the question of whether the limiting displacement for this short-range apparent motion is determined by the retinal angle or by the number of pixels across which the patch is displaced; our data support the former hypothesis. The number of dots in the patch is not a confo...

Adverse changes in rangeland vegetation can be considered as one of the criteria for land degradation. Some of these changes can be evaluated through monitoring the spatial changes of landscape parameters. This study aimed to investigate the landscape changes in Kezab rangelands of Yazd province, central Iran. Landsat satellite images of 1990, 2002, and 2013, and landscape metrics including Tot...