Differences in brain region size among species are thought to arise late in development via adaptive control over neurogenesis, as cells of previously patterned compartments proliferate, die, and/or differentiate into neurons. Here we investigate comparative brain development in ecologically distinct cichlid fishes from Lake Malawi and demonstrate that brains vary among recently evolved lineage...

A program of field loading tests was conducted to measure the axial response of drilled foundations constructed using a variety of different drilling techniques. The research was performed at the Auburn University National Geotechnical Experimentation Site at Spring Villa, Alabama in Piedmont geology composed of silty soils formed by weathering of parent metamorphic rocks. A total of 10 drilled...

Data on discontinuities are always necessary for design, characterization and analysis of rock structures. The time honored method of manual measurements with Brunton compass is both time consuming and often inconvenient given issues such as restricted access to measurement areas, introduction of erroneous data due to sampling difficulties and human bias, considerable safety risks since measure...

The mechanical characteristics and orientation of joints determine the behaviour of rock masses, including the strength, the stiffness, and all forms of conduction and diffusion. Furthermore, the preferential orientation of joints renders the medium anisotropic. In turn, these properties affect the velocity and damping of propagating elastic waves. The purpose of this study is to investigate th...

A dam ant colony optimization (D-ACO) analysis of the overall stability of high arch dams on complicated foundations is presented in this paper. A modified ant colony optimization (ACO) model is proposed for obtaining dam concrete and rock mechanical parameters. A typical dam parameter feedback problem is proposed for nonlinear back-analysis numerical model based on field monitoring deformation...

This paper presents our work on development of OWL-driven systems for formal representation and reasoning about terminological knowledge and facts in petrology. The long-term aim of our project is to provide solid foundations for a large-scale integration of various kinds of knowledge, including basic terms, rock classification algorithms, findings and reports. We describe three steps we have t...