effects of nitrogen fertilization timing close to the beginning of short-day period and white mulch on flowering and yield components have been studied in ‘paros’ and ‘queen elisa’ strawberry cultivars. split plot experiment in a randomized complete block design with eight treatments (two mulch treatments × n fertilization during four different times from last week of august to third week of se...

In the present report, diagnosis and treatment of a case with follicular ovarian cysts in a 5-year-old Persian queen cat is described. In response to palpation of spines, the queen cat presented herself in lordosis and danced up and down with her rear legs. Trans-abdominal ultrasonography examination showed 2 cysts  in the left ovary of the queen. Serum estrogen assay indicated elevated level o...

The North American little black ant, Monomorium sp. AZ-02 (subfamily Myrmicinae), displays a dimorphism that consists of alate (winged) and ergatoid (wingless) queens. Surveys at our field site in southcentral Arizona, USA, demonstrated that only one queen phenotype (alate or ergatoid) occurred in each colony during the season in which reproductive sexuals were produced. A morphometric analysis...

One artifact from my childhood in the 1960’s that I still remember vividly is the series of plastic slidingblock puzzles manufactured by The Roalex Company of Forest Hills, NY (no relation to the maker of fine timepieces). These consisted of a high-quality plastic puzzle glued to a piece of cardboard containing information about the puzzle. Most of their sixty or so different designs were based...

We show that the mixing time for the fifteen puzzle in an n× n torus is on the order of n logn.

The selective forces that shape and maintain eusocial societies are an enduring puzzle in evolutionary biology. Ordinarily sterile workers can usually reproduce given the right conditions, so the factors regulating reproductive division of labour may provide insight into why eusociality has persisted over evolutionary time. Queen-produced pheromones that affect worker reproduction have been imp...

We study here the problem of solving the traditional n-queens puzzle by a group of homogeneous reactive robots. We have devised two general and decentralized behaviour-based algorithms that solve the puzzle for N mobile robots. They all make a depth-first search with backtracking “in the wild” guaranteeing “in principle” a solution. In the first one, there is a predefined precedence order in th...

Post-Pleistocene avian colonization of deglaciated North America occurred from multiple refugia, including a coastal refugium in the northwest. The location of a Pacific Coastal refugium is controversial; however, multiple lines of evidence suggest that it was located near the Queen Charlotte Islands (also known as Haida Gwaii). The Queen Charlotte Islands contain a disproportionately large num...