Microbes that have adopted endosymbiotic life styles not only have evolved to live in specialized habitats within living organisms, but the living habitats also have evolved to accommodate them. The hindgut of the passalid beetle (Odontotaenius disjunctus) is lined with a cuticle that undergoes dramatic topographic changes during the life cycle of the beetle. This manuscript addresses the chang...

A new species, Strongylodon juangonzalezii Hadsall, Alejado & Cajano, collected from Buenavista Protected Landscape, Mulanay, Quezon, is hereby described. The new species is remarkable for its plagiotropic dense inflorescence made up of 27-31 flowers per cluster in a lateral branch. Flowers are lilac when young, then gradually turn blue when mature. A comparison of the morphology of Strongylodo...

The Eastern Sahara (Fig. i) is devoid of surface drainage -this unusual characteristic distinguishes its morphology from that of most other desert regions where running water dominates landscape development (Peel, 1939). Cyclic aridity, which is responsible for the obscuring eolian blankets and wind-erosion effects, had set in by the Pliocene-Pleistocene transition, about 2 million years ago (W...

The article discusses how Alexander von Humboldt developed the concepts of nature, space, and morphology in his works and impacted the shaping of modern physical geography. Influenced by Kant's ideas in Critique of judgment and also by the writings of Goethe and Schelling, Humboldt devised a new interpretation and representation of nature on Earth's surface, wherein the concept of space is esse...

In this study, three-dimensional (3D) PdCu alloyed nanostructures, consisting of one-dimensional (1D) branches, were successfully synthesized through a facile wet-chemical method without using any seeds or organic solvent. The success of this approach relies on the use of hydrochloric acid (HCl) to control the reduction rate, and on the presence of bromide ions (Br(-)) to selectively adsorb on ...

Reinforcement learning for embodied agents is a challenging problem. The accumulated reward to be optimized is often a very rugged function, and gradient methods are impaired by many local optimizers. We demonstrate, in an experimental setting, that incorporating an intrinsic reward can smoothen the optimization landscape while preserving the global optimizers of interest. We show that policy g...

When the diploid histoblasts, the precursors of adult abdominal epidermal cells, of the larva of Drosophila are deleted by gamma-radiation, the polytene larval epidermal cells survive metamorphosis and secrete cuticle and cuticular outgrowths. A comparison of the morphology of the cuticle secreted by the larval epidermal cells in the different regions of the abdominal segments to that secreted ...

This study provided data that can be used to discriminate asbestiform and non-asbestiform amphiboles contained in landscaping rocks recreational parks. The length width of fibers being at least 5 μm long with a minimum aspect ratio 3:1 were measured using transmission electron microscope compared an asbestos reference sample. park samples thicker than 1 (average 1.9 μm), while the Health Safe...