Maternal aggression is directed towards intruders by lactating females and is critical for defense of offspring. Within-family selection for increased maternal defense in outbred house mice (Mus domesticus; Hsd:ICR strain) was applied to one selected (S) line, using total duration of attacks in a 3-min test as the selection criterion. One control (C) line was maintained and both lines were prop...

The relationship of coping and defense to Type A behavior pattern (TABP), as measured by the Structured Interview and the Jenkins Activity Survey (JAS), was investigated to understand the dynamics of TABP and psychological factors associated with coronary heart disease (CHD) risk. It was hypothesized that global TABP and its component "speed and impatience" would be related to the use of defens...

Grooming is a well-recognized, multipurpose, behavior in arthropods and vertebrates. In this paper, we review the literature to highlight the physical function, neurophysiological mechanisms, and role that grooming plays in insect defense against pathogenic infection. The intricate relationships between the physical, neurological and immunological mechanisms of grooming are discussed to illustr...

The primary goal of our demonstration is to show results we obtained on communication among artificial and human agents interacting in a simulated air defense domain. For artificial agents, we advocate a decision-theoretic message selection mechanism which maximizes the expected utility of the communicative actions. Thus, the agents compute the expected utility of alternative communicative beha...

to test whether they would remove experimentally infested pupae following methods of Boecking and Drescher (1992). In 1994, the hygienic colonies removed significantly more pupae infested with one mite per cell than the non-hygienic colonies. In 1995, there was no significant difference between the hygienic and non-hygienic colonies when one or two mites were introduced per pupa due to variatio...

Application-level, aka “flash-DDoS” attacks are the most challenging form of distributed denial of service (DDoS). They flood the victim with legitimate-like service requests generated from numerous bots. There is no defense today that is even remotely effective against flash-DDoS attacks. Traditional DDoS defenses that look for malicious content fail because flash-crowd attacks generate legiti...

Diverse life forms have evolved internal clocks enabling them to monitor time and thereby anticipate the daily environmental changes caused by Earth's rotation. The plant circadian clock regulates expression of about one-third of the Arabidopsis genome, yet the physiological relevance of this regulation is not fully understood. Here we show that the circadian clock, acting with hormone signals,...

This paper reports on results we obtained on communication among artiicial and human agents interacting in a simulated air defense domain. In our research, we postulate that the artiicial agents use a decision-theoretic method to select optimal communicative acts, given the characteristics of the particular situation. Thus, the agents we implemented compute the expected utilities of various alt...

One key advantage of eusociality is shared defense of the nest, brood, and stored food; nest defense plays an important role in the biology of eusocial bees. Recent studies on honey bees, Apis mellifera, have focused on the placement of defensive activity in the overall scheme of division of labor, showing that guard bees play a unique and important role in colony defense. Alarm pheromones func...

Courts in the United States do not recognize a formal “cultural defense” for criminal acts committed by defendants belonging to other cultures. This means that courts ostensibly do not take foreign cultural practices, customs, or beliefs into account in evaluating the guilt of individuals who break U.S. laws. Nonetheless, courts have repeatedly permitted cultural evidence to be introduced as an...