Bacterial virus use as antibacterial agents, in the guise of what is commonly known as phage therapy, is an inherently physiological, ecological, and also pharmacological process. Physiologically we can consider metabolic properties of phage infections of bacteria and variation in those properties as a function of preexisting bacterial states. In addition, there are patient responses to pathoge...

D ifferent areas in biology are often criticized for being either too myopic and not asking questions about how their results fit into a larger framework or for being too broad and ignoring important details. A few research programs are now attempting to make general claims derived from simple, micro-level phenomena. This is great progress for biology, resolving some of the tensions between dif...

Traditional ecological theory has stressed the importance of competitive interactions in regulating species richness. Recent research has transcended this viewpoint by considering the role of stochastic processes, mosaic phenomena and nonequilibrium conditions in the regulation of richness. This growing body of work indicates that the determinants of plant species richness may vary predictably ...

Several adolescent developmental problems in Hong Kong are briefly reviewed in this paper. First, rising adolescent substance abuse trends are described. Second, Internet use problems and Internet addiction among young people are examined. Third, worrying trends in adolescent sexuality are identified. Fourth, phenomena on bullying among young people are reviewed. Finally, phenomena related to a...

Concepts of spatial scale, such as extent, grain, resolution, range, footprint, support and cartographic ratio are not interchangeable. Because of the potential confusion among the definitions of these terms, we suggest that authors avoid the term ‘‘scale’’ and instead refer to specific concepts. In particular, we are careful to discriminate between observation scales, scales of ecological phen...

We investigate stability and dynamics of large ecological networks by introducing classical methods of dynamical system theory from physics, including Hamiltonian and averaging methods. Our analysis exploits the topological structure of the network, namely the existence of strongly connected nodes (hubs) in the networks. We reveal new relations between topology, interaction structure, and netwo...

Relative spectral reflectance is an illumination invarient image feature that is related to many ecological phenomena that are difficult to measure, such as plant CO2 uptake. We describe a procedure to estimate the relative spectral reflectance of known subject using color image features. Through application, we show that this procedure produces accurate estimates in the presence of changing fi...