The porcelain crab Petrolisthes cinctipes lives under rocks and in mussel beds in the mid-intertidal zone where it experiences immersion during high tide and saturating humid conditions in air during low tide, which can increase habitat temperature by up to 20°C. To identify the biochemical changes affected by increasing temperature fluctuations and subsequent heat shock, we acclimated P. cinct...

Environmental fluctuations can select for generalism, which is also hypothesized to increase organisms' ability to invade novel environments. Here, we show that across a range of temperatures, opportunistic bacterial pathogen Serratia marcescens that evolved in fluctuating temperature (daily variation between 24°C and 38°C, mean 31°C) outperforms the strains that evolved in constant temperature...

We study the thermodynamic behavior of a simple off-lattice model for protein folding. The model is two-dimensional and has two different “amino acids”. Using numerical simulations of all chains containing eight or ten monomers, we examine the sequence dependence at a fixed temperature. It is shown that only a few of the chains exist in unique folded state at this temperature, and the energy le...

We describe the statistics of temperature fluctuations in a SINIS structure, where a normal metal island (N) is coupled by tunnel junctions (I) to two superconducting leads (S). We specify conditions under which this structure exhibits manifestly non-Gaussian fluctuations of temperature. We consider both the Gaussian and non-Gaussian regimes of these fluctuations, and the current fluctuations t...

Hypothesis: The effects of temperature variation on life-history traits depend on both mean developmental temperature and geographic population of origin. Organism: Pitcher plant mosquitoes, Wyeomyia smithii. Field sites: We established laboratory colonies from three geographic populations spanning a latitudinal and altitudinal gradient in eastern North America. Sites at lower latitudes or alti...

Development of ectotherms is highly temperature dependent. Studies using variable thermal environments can improve ecological relevance of data because organisms naturally face day-to-day stochastic temperature fluctuations as well as seasonal changes in the amplitude of such daily fluctuations. The objective of this study was to investigate if, and to what extent, the use of constant temperatu...

Germination response to fluctuating temperatures is a mechanism by which seeds detect gaps in vegetation canopies and depth of burial in soil, and it is very important for plants. Thus, studies on the effect of fluctuating temperature on germination at the community level are valuable for understanding community structure and biodiversity maintenance. We determined the effects of two alternatin...

The reasons to expect the formation of ordered or fluctuating charge stripes and antiphase spin domains in high temperature superconductors are surveyed. Evidence for such behavior is described, and some of the consequences for the physical properties of high temperature superconductors and the mechanism of superconductivity are presented.