For a long time, there have been the mountainous discussions about intertexuality in the field of novelist narrative studies by scholars from China and western countries in their academic practices in terms of the in-textual responses from a novelist narrative text to another produced either by the same writer or by different novelists based on the academic focus of the textual influences from ...

Pollinator shifts are considered to drive floral trait evolution, yet little is still known about the modifications of petal epidermal surface at a biogeographic region scale. Here we investigated how independent shifts from insects to passerine birds in the Macaronesian Islands consistently modified this floral trait (i.e. absence of papillate cells). Using current phylogenies and extensive ev...

Seasonal variations on the content of harpagoside in Scrophularia scorodonia L. (Scrophulariaceae) were investigated using plants collected monthly from January to December in 1995. During growth of this species the percentage of harpagoside was the highest during the maximum development of the plant, specially in July. Harpagoside levels differed among leaves, stems and flowers of S. scorodoni...

Flower colour is mainly due to the presence and type of pigments. Pollinator preferences impose selection on flower that ultimately acts Knowing how pollinators perceive flowers with different pigments becomes crucial for a comprehensive understanding plant-pollinator communication evolution. Based space models, we studied whether main groups pollinators, specifically hymenopterans, dipterans, ...

The form of angiosperm flowers is thought to have evolved in part via selection that excludes ineffective pollinators and increases the efficiency of pollen transfer by effective ones. In previous studies with the montane plant Ipomopsis aggregata, we documented pollinator-mediated selection on several aspects of floral form, including flower width. This character varies continuously within nat...

Humans innately perceive infantile features as cute. The ethologist Konrad Lorenz proposed that the infantile features of mammals and birds, known as the baby schema (kindchenschema), motivate caretaking behaviour. As biologically relevant stimuli, newborns are likely to be processed specially in terms of visual attention, perception, and cognition. Recent demonstrations on human participants h...