If we categorize religions according to whether they give greater prominence to time or to space, the role of “promise” marks a religion of covenant as clearly a religion of time. Yet the future is unknowable and can only be present to us as a field of possibilities. How far do these possibilities extend? The question directs us back to the nature of time, a question that became concealed in th...

Growth of Red, GIFT and Supreme Nile tilapia strains were evaluated. Fish were cultivated in indoor recirculation systems in 0.5 m3 tanks with controlled temperatures of 22, 28 and 30°C. Random samples of 20 fish from each strain (10 fish tank) were weighed at day 7, 30, 60, 90 and 120. Exponential model (y=Ae) and Gompertz model (y = Aexp(-Be)) were fitted and the estimates parameters were obt...

The title of my lecture is “Nature’s gift to Science.” It is not a lecture about one scientific journal paying respects to another, but about how the great diversity of the living world can both inspire and serve innovation in biological research. Current ideas of the uses of Model Organisms spring from the exemplars of the past and choosing the right organism for one’s research is as important...

UNLABELLED A number of freely available text mining tools have been put together to extract highly reliable Drosophila gene interaction data from text. The system has been tested with The Interactive Fly, showing low recall (27-34%), but very high precision (93-97%). AVAILABILITY The extracted data and a web interface for submission of texts to GIFT analysis are available at http://gift.cryst...

Employing a survival analysis approach, this study synthesizes 3 aspects of gift literature and suggests their effects on the timing of dissolution for a romantic relationship. Products or services can be consumed for the purpose of enhancing self-attractiveness (self-gift), expressing love to partners (other-gift), and announcing a relationship to the outer world (joint-gift). Results indicate...

Asians are more likely than North Americans to refuse a small gift that is offered to them by a casual acquaintance. Five experiments confirmed this difference and explored the reasons for its occurrence. Asians, who are inclined to think of themselves in relation to others, are more likely than North Americans to invoke a reciprocity norm in exchanging gifts with casual acquaintances, and they...

Gift givers balance their goal to please recipients with gifts that match recipients’ preferences against their goal to signal relational closeness with gifts that demonstrate their knowledge of the recipient. Five studies in a gift registry context show that when close (vs. distant) givers receive attribution for the gifts they choose, they are more likely to diverge from the registry to choos...