It is now widely appreciated that competition between kin inhibits the evolution of altruism. In standard population genetics models, it is difficult for indiscriminate altruism towards social partners to be favoured at all. The reason is that while limited dispersal increases the kinship of social partners it also intensifies local competition. One solution that has received very little attent...

It is well understood that sociocultural practices strongly influence Taenia solium transmission; however, the extent to which interspecific parasite competition moderates Taenia transmission has yet to be determined. This is certainly the case in Southeast Asia where T. solium faces competition in both the definitive host (people) and the intermediate host (pigs). In people, adult worms of T. ...

Recent neurophysiological experimental results suggest that the prefrontal cortex plays an important role in filtering out unattended visual inputs. Here we propose a neurodynamical computational model of a part of the prefrontal cortex to account for the neural mechanisms defining this attentional filtering effect. Similar models have been employed to explain experimental results obtained duri...

Sequence-specific recognition of DNA can be achieved by triple helix-forming oligonucleotides that bind to the major groove of double-helical DNA. These oligonucleotides have been used as sequence-specific DNA ligands for various purposes, including sequence-specific gene regulation in the so-called 'antigene strategy'. In particular, (G,A)-containing oligonucleotides can form stable triple hel...

Cognitive appraisal before competition includes self-efficacy, traditionally defined as motivation and the perceived ability to perform well; presumably, both dimensions would affect the biological response to a contest. We aimed to analyze the role of self-efficacy in the psychobiological response to a competition in women. Forty university students were confronted in pairs on a laboratory com...

Competition plays an important role in structuring the community dynamics of phytophagous insects. As the number and impact of biological invasions increase, it has become increasingly important to determine whether competitive differences exist between native and exotic insects. We conducted a meta-analysis to test the hypothesis that native/ exotic status affects the outcome of herbivore comp...

Biological invasion has become a serious global environmental problems and been considered as an important component of global change. Invasions by alien species can have an impact at several levels of ecological complexity from genes to ecosystems. Invasive alien species had seriously threated the biodiversity and natural ecosystems in China, and caused economic losses by more than US$7 billio...