PREMISE OF THE STUDY Preventing new plant invasions is critical for reducing large-scale ecological change. Most studies have focused on the deliberate introduction of nonnatives via the ornamental plant trade. However, accidental introduction may be an important source of nonnative, invasive plants. METHODS Using Web and literature searches, we compiled pathways of introduction to the United...

Is the classic difficulty for Japanese listeners to perceive /r/-/l/ entirely attributable to the lack of a liquid contrast in the Japanese phonological system, or is it also due to phonetic factors? On the “phonology-only” view, the level of difficulty that Japanese listeners experience in perceiving /r/-/l/ should not depend on the language in which /r/-/l/ is produced. For instance, Japanese...

We explore the consequences of very high dimensionality in the dynamical landscape of protein folding. Consideration of both typical range of stabilizing interactions, and folding rates themselves, leads to a model of the energy hypersurface that is characterized by the structure of diffusive "hypergutters" as well as the familiar "funnels". Several general predictions result: 1), intermediate ...

Unfolded proteins may contain a native or nonnative residual structure, which has important implications for the thermodynamics and kinetics of folding, as well as for misfolding and aggregation diseases. However, it has been universally accepted that residual structure should not affect the global size scaling of the denatured chain, which obeys the statistics of random coil polymers. Here we ...