In order to maximize their fitness, organisms in seasonal environments rely on external cues to optimally time their life-history stages. One of the most important zeitgeber to time reproduction is the photoperiod, but further environmental cues are assessed to fine-tune reproduction due to year-to-year variation in environmental conditions. However, in urbanized environments, the pervasive art...

We wish to respond to the commentary of de la Iglesia et al. [1]. Studies comparing sleep in different communities have different goals. One frequent goal has been to determine how sleep is affected by manipulating specific 'modern' conditions. Many studies have investigated the effect of artificial light and electronic entertainment. Such studies have clearly shown that light, particularly blu...

Strong artificial life research is often thought to rely on Alife systems as sources of novel empirical data. It is hoped that by augmenting our observations of natural life, this novel data can help settle empirical questions, and thereby separate fundamental properties of living systems from those aspects that are merely contingent on the idiosyncrasies of terrestrial evolution. Some authors ...

The authors used a thermoregulation paradigm to test the hypothesis that chronic treatment with bright artificial light produces subsensitivity to the hypothermic effects of clonidine, an alpha 2-agonist. One week of treatment produced blunting of the hypothermic response to clonidine (p less than 0.00001). These findings are consistent with previous reports that somatic treatments for depressi...

INTRODUCTION AND BACKGROUND Photovoltaic (PV) solar energy conversion is one of the most promising emerging renewable energy technologies and is likely to play an ever-increasing role in the future of electricity generation. The potential of photovoltaics is considered to be much larger than the current energy demand, which is equivalent to ≈13,000 millions tons of oil (BP, 2014). Together with...

Rapidly increasing levels of light pollution subject nocturnal organisms to major alterations of their habitat, the ecological consequences of which are largely unknown. Moths are well-known to be attracted to light at night, but effects of light on other aspects of moth ecology, such as larval development and life-history, remain unknown. Such effects may have important consequences for fitnes...

The bottom-up construction and operation of machines and motors of molecular size is a topic of great interest in nanoscience, and a fascinating challenge of nanotechnology. The problem of the energy supply to make molecular machines work is of the greatest importance. Research in the last ten years has demonstrated that light energy can be used to power artificial nanomachines by exploiting ph...

Bright artificial light is a treatment for seasonal depression. Eleven (11) rats were exposed to bright artificial light (11,500 lux) for two consecutive weeks. The thermic response to nicotine was measured prior to light exposure and after one and two weeks of treatment. The thermic response to nicotine at baseline was -1.69 +/- 0.25 degrees C (mean +/- SEM). The thermic response to nicotine w...

“The analysis of cryptic text is hard problem”, and there is no fixed algorithm for generating plain-text from cipher text. Human brains do this intelligently. The intelligent cryptic analysis process needs learning algorithms, co-operative effort of cryptanalyst and mechanism of knowledge based inference engine. This information of knowledge base will be useful for mining data(plain-text, key ...