which had Galileo among its members. He commissioned artists to record plants, birds and animals for his museum and a pictorial encyclopaedia that attempted to understand and classify both the natural and ‘man-made’ world. Alexander Marshal’s floral paintings were compiled at a time when the cultivation of gardens had become a pursuit of scholars and collectors, keenly interested in exotic spec...

To truly understand the visual world our models should be able not only to recognize images but also generate them. To this end, there has been exciting recent progress on generating images from natural language descriptions. These methods give stunning results on limited domains such as descriptions of birds or flowers, but struggle to faithfully reproduce complex sentences with many objects a...

I address questions raised by an observation of a Black-throated Blue Warbler (Setophaga caerulescens) eating unrefined granulated cane sugar in Kingston, Jamaica. Sugar consumption implies the presence of taste receptors sensitive to sucrose and digestive sucrase activity sufficient to assimilate highly concentrated sucrose solutions. The ability to efficiently digest disaccharides, such as su...

the separation of saffron stigmas from fresh flowers is the most important and the most difficult stage of saffron harvesting. saffron production costs are high because this harvesting stage is done by hand and is very time-consuming. one way of preserving the saffron flower is to dry it. the separating of the stigma from dried saffron flowers can then be done at an appropriate time. this study...

Most traditional image retrieval approaches are based on text surrounding images and fail to capture the content information of the images. These approaches are able to satisfy the present demands. To overcome the limitations of previous approaches, in this paper, we propose a new image retrieval method based on probability similarity learning which is able to exploit probabilistic distribution...

Individual plants produce repeated structures such as leaves, flowers or fruits, which, although belonging to the same genotype, are not phenotypically identical. Such subindividual variation reflects the potential of individual genotypes to vary with micro-environmental conditions. Furthermore, variation in organ traits imposes costs to foraging animals such as time, energy and increased preda...

Both field and laboratory studies demonstrate that hummingbirds (Apodiformes, Trochilidae) have exceptional spatial memory. The complexity of spatial-temporal information that hummingbirds must retain and use daily is probably subserved by the hippocampal formation (HF), and therefore, hummingbirds should have a greatly expanded HF. Here, we compare the relative size of the HF in several hummin...

In hermaphroditic plants, female reproductive success often varies among different positions within an inflorescence. However, few studies have evaluated the relative importance of underlying causes such as pollen limitation, resource limitation or architectural effect, and few have compared male allocation. During a 2-year investigation, we found that female reproductive success of an acropeta...

For all the different alternatives, we use the adaptive gradient in the training of the autoencoder. Table 1 shows the classification accuracy for the task labeling problem achieved by each of the different choices and our Expert Gate autoencoder. It can be noticed that the linear gate (Linear Autoencoder) fails to recognize the examples from the Flowers dataset – the linearly learned subspace ...

Important plant pollinators like bees and birds have very different color visual systems. Previous work has attempted to relate flower syndromes to the respective visual capabilities of the most important pollinators, but has often been limited by the lack of robust means to make between-species comparisons of how flower color signals are processed. In a recent study we solved this dilemma by c...