BACKGROUND Angiostrongylus cantonensis (Chen, 1935) is a parasite of murid rodents and causative agent of human neuro-angiostrongyliasis. In 2011, the Ogasawara Islands in the western North Pacific were assigned a World Natural Heritage site status. The occurrence of A. cantonensis is well documented in the Chichijima, Hahajima, and Anijima Islands. However, the occurrence of A. cantonensis in ...

Islands have traditionally been considered to be any relatively small body of land completely surrounded by water. However, their primary biological characteristic, an extended period of isolation from a source of colonists, is common also to many situations on continents. Accordingly, theories and predictions developed for true islands have been applied to a huge array of systems, from rock po...

The tree island hammock communities in the Florida Everglades provide one of many examples of self-organized wetland landscape. However, little is understood about why these elevated tree island communities have higher nutrient concentration than the surrounding freshwater marshes. Here we used stable isotopes and elemental analysis to compare dry season water limitation and soil and foliar nut...

Islands make up 5.3% of Earth’s land area yet maintain an estimated 19% of bird species, 17% of rodents, 17% of flowering plants, and 27% of human languages. Species diversity is disproportionately threatened on islands in relation to the islands’ proportion of both global land area and species, with 61% of all extinct species and 37% of all critically endangered species confined to islands. La...

The stability behavior of low immersion helical end milling processes is investigated in this paper. Low radial immersion milling operations involve interrupted cutting which induces chatter vibration under certain cutting conditions. Time Finite Element Analysis (TFEA) is suggested for an approximate solution for delayed differential equations encountered during interrupted milling. An improve...

Scanning tunneling microscopy studies of Cu islands grown on TiO2(110) demonstrate that these islands disappear from the STM images after exposure to oxygen gas (60-2000 Langmuir). Based on X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy experiments, the disappearance of the Cu islands cannot be explained by the loss of Cu from the surface or by a dramatic change in the electronic properties of the islands. T...

Global biodiversity loss is disproportionately rapid on islands, where invasive species are a major driver of extinctions. To inform conservation planning aimed at preventing extinctions, we identify the distribution and biogeographic patterns of highly threatened terrestrial vertebrates (classified by the International Union for Conservation of Nature) and invasive vertebrates on ~465,000 isla...

Epitaxial Cu2O islands on a Cu(100) surface formed through oxidizing Cu(100) films at 600 degrees C in an ultrahigh vacuum transmission electron microscope were observed to undergo a shape transition from initially square shaped islands to elongated islands at a critical size of approximately 110 nm. Our experimental data on the elongation of Cu2O islands agree with the energetic calculations b...

The dynamics of nanoscale islands in the vicinity of a monoatomic step on a metal electrode surface under potential control have been investigated by potential pulse perturbation time-resolved scanning tunneling microscopy (P3 TR-STM). As the metastable islands decay, a clear anisotropy develops in the spatial distribution of islands, relative to the monoatomic step. Islands appear to be stabil...