This study investigates patterns of plant diversity following wildfires in fire-prone shrublands of California, seeks to understand those patterns in terms of both local and landscape factors, and considers the implications for fire management. Ninety study sites were established following extensive wildfires in 1993, and 1000-m(2) plots were used to sample a variety of parameters. Data on comm...

Structural modifications to the surface of active layer hybrid organic-inorganic self-powered broadband photodetectors lead a remarkable enhancement in their photoresponse.

Channels have always been important geologic features in the exploration for oil and gas. With 3-D seismic data they can often be mapped easily on time or depth slices. In other situations they can be difficult to detect, due to structural complexity or other factors. There are a number of image-processing algorithms that can be used to enhance linear features such as channels in 3-D seismic vo...

We advocate incremental construction of programs based on the idea of skeletons and techniques. Program construction begins bottom-up by rst identifying skeleton program(s) embodying the central data structure(s), and proceeds by building computations around the control ow of the skeleton program(s) by application of techniques. Techniques are high level abstractions for the generic, frequently...

Nucleic acids are attractive materials for creating functional molecules that have applications as catalysts, specific binders, and molecular switches. Nucleic acids having such functions can be obtained by random screening, typically using in vitro selection methods. These methods have helped explore the potential abilities of nucleic acids and steadily contributed to their evolution, i.e., cr...

We report a new residual dipolar couplings (RDCs) based NMR procedure for rapidly determining RNA tertiary structure demonstrated on a uniformly (15)N/(13)C-labeled 27 nt variant of the trans-activation response element (TAR) RNA from HIV-I. In this procedure, the time-consuming nuclear Overhauser enhancement (NOE)-based sequential assignment step is replaced by a fully automated RDC-based assi...

Denoising filters are useful for reducing noise; however, they often blur and smear the edges and boundaries, which are necessary for segmenting or locating the objects. In order to overcome above problem, many filters with contrast enhancement capability have been developed, and they have wide applications in related fields. Recently, researchers found that the traditional criteria, such as me...

BACKGROUND The origin and clinical relevance of exercise-induced premature ventricular beats (PVBs) in patients without coronary heart disease or cardiomyopathies is unknown. Cardiovascular magnetic resonance enables us to non-invasively assess myocardial scarring and oedema. The purpose of our study was to discover any evidence of myocardial anomalies in patients with exercise-induced ventricu...

Benzodiazepine enhancement of GABA(A) receptor current requires a gamma subunit, and replacement of the gamma subunit by the delta subunit abolishes benzodiazepine enhancement. Although it has been demonstrated that benzodiazepines bind to GABA(A) receptors at the junction between alpha and gamma subunits, the structural basis for the coupling of benzodiazepine binding to allosteric enhancement...