a two-year period. The mandate of the current Chair, Paul Larson, is coming to an end and it is time to elect a Chair for the next two years. The TCDE Chair Nominating Committee, consisting of Paul Larson, Erich Neuhold, and Calton Pu is nominating David Lomet for the position as Chair of TCDE. A call for nominations was published in the June issue of the Data Engineering Bulletin but no other ...

In the Drosophila leg, activation of Notch leads to the establishment of the joints that subdivide the appendage into segments. We find that mutations in bowl result in similar phenotypes to Notch, causing fusion and truncations of tarsal segments (tarsomeres) and, like its close relative Odd-skipped, Bowl is produced in response to Notch signalling at a subset of segment boundaries. However, d...

Rearing full siblings under different environmental conditions allows partitioning of the total phenotypic variance of a trait into its genetic and environmental components. This, in natural bird populations, is usually achieved by cross-fostering experimental designs. We estimated genetic and environmental components of nestling-fitness traits using an alternative experimental approach in a ma...

Morphometrics (culmen length, bill height, bill width, wing chord length, and tarsus length) were taken on 664 marbled murrelets at Desolation Sound and Mussel Inlet, British Columbia, during 1994 to 1997, in order to assess morphological differences within and between populations and the accuracy of a discriminant function analysis to identify the sex of birds. An assessment of interand intra-...

The extent to which fluctuating selection can maintain evolutionary stasis in most populations remains an unresolved question in evolutionary biology. Climate has been hypothesized to drive reversals in the direction of selection among different time periods and may also be responsible for intense episodic selection caused by rare weather events. We measured viability selection associated with ...

Serial homologs are similar structures that develop at different positions within a body plan. These structures share some, but not all, aspects of developmental patterning, and their evolution is thought to be constrained by shared, pleiotropic gene functions. Here we describe the functions of 17 developmental genes during metamorphic development of the legs in the red flour beetle, Tribolium ...

It has long been established that fleas jump by storing and releasing energy in a cuticular spring, but it is not known how forces from that spring are transmitted to the ground. One hypothesis is that the recoil of the spring pushes the trochanter onto the ground, thereby generating the jump. A second hypothesis is that the recoil of the spring acts through a lever system to push the tibia and...