BACKGROUND Leishmaniasis remains a global health problem because of the substantial holes that remain in our understanding of sand fly ecology and the failure of traditional vector control methods. The specific larval food source is unknown for all but a few sand fly species, and this is particularly true for the vectors of Leishmania parasites. We provide methods and materials that could be us...

Sand fields develop different patterns, such as sandbars, sand ridges, sand ripples, sand dunes, and river dunes. These vary in shape from crescent to ridge-like patterns. They are formed in areas such as deserts, lakes and seashores, where winds or fluid flows are strong and tend to blow from one direction or oscillate. There is a great deal of order in these patterns: perhaps a simple model c...

The western sand darter Ammocrypta clara, and eastern sand darter Ammocrypta pellucida, are sand-dwelling fishes of conservation concern. Past research has emphasized the importance of studying individual populations of conservation concern, while recent research has revealed the importance of incorporating landscape scale processes that structure habitat mosaics and local populations. We exami...

Many learning tasks involve searching through a discrete space of performance elements, seeking an element whose future utility is expected to be high. As the task of nding the global optimum is often intractable, many practical learning systems use simple forms of hill-climbing to nd a locally optimal element. However, hill-climbing can be complicated by the fact that the utility value of a pe...

When Jim Lyons-Weiler and I discussed what we might do with an Open Access journal on Cancer Informatics, we both felt that it was important to avoid loosing focus on what the end-point of both the research and its dissemination is. In all its forms cancer is inevitably an unpleasant affl iction that harms every aspect of the lives of sufferers and those who love them. Jim and I want this journ...

Awake versus Anesthetized: Layer-Specific Sensory Processing in Visual Cortex and 1 Functional Connectivity between Cortical Areas 2 3 Running Head: Anesthetics Disrupt Sensory Processing 4 5 Kristin K. Sellers, Davis V. Bennett, Axel Hutt , James H. Williams, and Flavio Frohlich 6 7 1 Department of Psychiatry, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill NC 27599 8 2 Neurobiology C...

W. Gao, H. Zhu, K. Giovanello, K. Smith, D. Shen, J. Gilmore, and W. Lin Department of Biomedical Engineering, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, North Carolina, United States, Department of Biostatistics and BRIC, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, Department of Psychology and BRIC, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, Department of Radiology, University of Nort...

W. Gao, H. Zhu, K. Giovanello, K. Smith, D. Shen, J. Gilmore, and W. Lin Department of Biomedical Engineering, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, North Carolina, United States, Department of Biostatistics and BRIC, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, Department of Psychology and BRIC, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, Department of Radiology, University of Nort...

This research describes the goals, design and implementation of a quasi natural gradient, laboratory scale, sand tank (aquifer) model experiment. The model was used to study the transport of an inorganic tracer (Chloride) in groundwater, within a tropical aquifer (porous medium) material. Three-dimensional sand tank (1.8 m × 0.3 m × 0.8 m) experiments were conducted to investigate contaminant t...