One of the most important factors affecting the design of the structures, is the impact of the earthquake loadings on the forces and the design displacements. Nevertheless, the influences of the near structures on the existing buildings, that sometimes can cause great changes in forces and displacements, can never be forgotten. Thus, the induced displacement in the adjacent buildings of a newly...

The complexity of patterns in higher organisms requires a hierarchical linkage of many pattern-forming reactions. Basic arrangements are two structures that appear either adjacent to each other or at opposite poles of a field. The freshwater polyp Hydra will be used to illustrate corresponding mechanisms. The hypostome (mouth opening) with the surrounding tentacles is an example for two adjacen...

One important mechanism suggested to underlie the acquisition of grammar is rule learning. Indeed, infants aged 0 ; 7 are able to learn rules based on simple identity relations (adjacent repetitions, ABB: "wo fe fe" and non-adjacent repetitions, ABA: "wo fe wo", respectively; Marcus et al., 1999). One unexplored issue is whether young infants are able to process both adjacent and non-adjacent r...

Extensive research has been focused on the progressive collapse analysis of buildings and most of them are based on the alternative path method (APM) with sudden removal of one or several columns. However, in this method the damage of adjacent elements of removed columns under blast conditions was ignored and this issue can lead to an incorrect prediction of progressive collapse. Therefore, in ...