Comparing violins requires competence and involves both subjective objective evaluations. In this manuscript, vibration tests were performed on a set of 25 violins, historical new. The resulting bridge admittances modeled in the low mid-frequency ranges through features. Once projected into new representation, three made by Stradivari famous reproduction revealed high similarity. PCA highlighte...

the pollution of aquatic ecosystems may affect natural reproduction of fish populations by decreasing the fertilization efficiency. among the various sources of pollution, heavy metals are important group, being found in both freshwater and marine environment. the present study investigated changes of sperm characteristics of caspimyzon wagneri when exposed to manganese (mn). spermatozoids were...

the objective was to quantify and compare cow cervical morphology on oestrus vs. non-oestrus daysusing a new farm technology. the cervical tissues were videotaped using a cervixscope involving newcamera equipment in four holstein cows on multiple oestrus and non-oestrus days to score tissue morphology as altered by oestrus. the non-oestrous days were in diestrus phases. the videotaped records w...

in this study, the morphological and histological studies of male and female gonads in mudskipper, periophthalmus waltoni koumans, 1941 from helleh estuary (bushehr province, southwestern iran) were performed to determine its gonadal development stages and histo-morphological characteristics. sampling was done from april 2010 to march 2011 and a total of 81 individuals were collected by hand ne...

Earlier studies of the coral Pocillopora damicornis provide a conflicting picture of its use of sexual and asexual reproduction for population maintenance. In Western Australia, colonies are asexually viviparous, and populations appear to be maintained by localised asexual recruitment but founded by genotypically diverse colonists. However, on Australia’s Great Barrier Reef (GBR), as in many ot...

Epiphytic lichens possess unique life history traits that can have conflicting effects on genetic structure: symbiotic mutualism between a fungus with its algal or cyanobacterial photobiont, association with a host plant, and ability to reproduce sexually and asexually. Our study species, Ramalina menziesii, has small ascospores that can facilitate long-distance gene movement, and it is capable...

Based on results from a survey study in a sample of Australian parents of twins, Raj and Morley (2007) reported that questions concerning the mode of conception of twins may be offensive to parents. We looked at the willingness to reply to questions about mode of conception of twin pregnancies in a large survey study that was completed by 20,150 mothers of twins from the Netherlands Twin Regist...

An enduring problem in evolutionary biology is the near ubiquity of sexual reproduction despite the inherent cost of transmitting only half the parent's genes to progeny. Queens of some ant species circumvent this cost by using selectively both sexual reproduction and parthenogenesis: workers arise from fertilized eggs, while new queens are produced by parthenogenesis. We show that queens of th...

The near-ubiquity of sexual reproduction in animal species has long been considered a paradox because sexually reproducing individuals transmit only half of their genome to their progeny. Here, we show that the ant Cataglyphis cursor circumvents this cost by using alternative modes of reproduction for the production of reproductive and nonreproductive offspring. New queens are almost exclusivel...