In a previous publication (4) it was shown that the red portion of the visible spectrum was especially effective in inducing photoperiodic responses in long day plants when used to prolong short winter days. These responses generally included earlier flowering, increased internodal development, and a greater top-root ratio. The yellow, blue, and green regions of the visible spectrum of waveleng...

It has been reported that ethylene production by cucumber plants is strongly related to the sex expression of their flowers. It has also been shown that both CS-ACS2 gene expression and ethylene evolution are much greater in gynoecious cucumber plants than monoecious ones. To investigate the action mechanism of ethylene in the induction of femaleness of cucumber flowers, we isolated three ethyl...

Datisca glomerata is an androdioecious plant species containing male and hermaphroditic individuals. Molecular markers and crossing data suggest that, in both D. glomerata and its dioecious sister species D. cannabina, sex is determined by a single nuclear locus, at which maleness is dominant. Supporting this conclusion, an amplified fragment length polymorphism (AFLP) is heterozygous in males ...

Other than studies on sex-labile Arisaema species, studies of gender patterns in Araceae are scarce. The modification of phenotypic and functional gender was investigated in three populations of the monoecious Arum italicum Miller. The probability of reproduction and the number of inflorescences produced increased with plant size, and flower number (total, male, staminodes, female, pistillodes)...

Although the arbitrariness of language has been considered one of its defining features, studies have demonstrated that certain phonemes tend to be associated with certain kinds of meaning. A well-known example is the Bouba/Kiki effect, in which nonwords like bouba are associated with round shapes while nonwords like kiki are associated with sharp shapes. These sound symbolic associations have ...

A number of studies have evaluated the effectiveness of a cricothyroid approximation (CA) in creating a more female voice in male-to-female transsexuals (MFTs) from an acoustic perspective. An increase in pitch is of little value, however, unless it accurately indicates listeners' perceptions of gender. The purpose of this study was to further investigate the effectiveness of a CA in feminizing...

Categorical perception (CP) is a fundamental cognitive process that enables us to sort similar objects in the world into meaningful categories with clear boundaries between them. CP has been found for high-level stimuli like human faces, more precisely, for the perception of face identity, expression and ethnicity. For sex however, which represents another important and biologically relevant di...

Scholars have frequently observed that Dionysus is a god who breaks down barriers (of gender, class, social norms, et cetera). This is true in Euripides's Bacchae to a certain extent, and the play's breakdown of the divide between male/female and Greek/foreign has been well examined in scholarship. However, the limitations of this questioning of boundaries are much less discussed. For instance,...

Hermaphrodite systems offer unique opportunities to study sexual differentiation, due their high degree of plasticity and the fact that, unlike gonochoristic systems, process is not confined an early developmental stage. In protandric shrimp species, such as Hippolyte inermis Pandalus platyceros , male differentiation followed by transformation femaleness during adulthood. The mechanisms contro...