The study of planetary environments of astrobiological interest has become a major challenge. Because of the obvious technical and economical limitations on in situ planetary exploration, laboratory simulations are one of the most feasible research options to make advances both in planetary science and in developing a consistent description of the origin of life. With this objective in mind, we...

In Costa Rica's Corcovado National Park, the fossorial land crab, Gecarcinus quadratus (Gecarcinidae), densely populates (1 - 6 m(-2)) a region of forest extending from the Park's Pacific coastline inland to ca. 600 m. Throughout this coastal forest ('crabzone'), crabs selectively forage for fallen leaves and relocate them to subterranean burrow chambers. Comparisons between surface soils (0 - ...

Drosophila melanogaster is a well-known model organism that can be used for studying oogenesis (egg chamber development) including gene expression patterns. Standard analysis methods require manual segmentation of individual egg chambers, which is a difficult and time-consuming task. We present an image processing pipeline to detect and localize Drosophila egg chambers that consists of the foll...

Resuspension of sediment-borne microorganisms (including pathogens) into the water column could increase the health risk for those using river water for different purposes. In the present work, we (1) investigated the effect of sediment disturbance on microbial resuspension from riverbed sediments in laboratory flow-chambers and in the Apies River, Gauteng, South Africa; and (2) estimated flow ...

This paper reports a reconfigurable microfluidic dilution device for high-throughput quantitative assays, which can easily produce discrete logarithmic/binary concentration profiles ranging from 1 to 100-fold dilution in parallel from a fixed sample volume (e.g., 10 μL) without any assistance of continuous fluidic pump or robotic automation. The integrated dilution generation chip consists of s...

Computational simulations of tissue differentiation have been able to capture the main aspects of tissue formation/regeneration observed in animal experiments-except for the considerable degree of variability reported. Understanding and modelling the source of this variability is crucial if computational tools are to be developed for clinical applications. The objective of this study was to tes...

thermal decomposition of two coal samples obtained from top seam sibi (tss) and sore range quetta (srq) coal fields in their raw and acid washed forms were carried out in an open type tubular pyrolyzer coupled to a gas chromatograph with fid. elemental analyses were carried out with scanning electron microscope-energy dispersive x-rays (sem-edx) analyzer. effect of inherent mineral contents on ...