The pentapeptide proctolin has multiple effects on the locust oviposition digging system. At the neuromuscular junction of the ventral opener muscle, it has a concentration-dependent range of modulatory effects. At low concentrations (10210 mol l21), proctolin causes an increase in the frequency of miniature excitatory junctional potentials, but has no apparent effects on the muscle membrane or...

Recent studies show that some features of odor perception are predicted by olfactory receptor biophysics and olfactory bulb physiology. Those studies used a behavioral assay in which rodents dig in a dish of scented cage bedding after pretraining to associate a buried reward with an odorant. The advantage of the digging task is an intensity measure of similarity (number of seconds spent digging...

Callicarpenal and intermedeol are two insect-repellent terpenoids isolated from leaves of American beautyberry (Callicarpa americana L.; Verbenaceae) and Japanese beautyberry (Callicarpa japonica Thunb.). The repellency of these two terpenoids against workers of red imported fire ants, Solenopsis invicta Buren, black imported fire ants, Solenopsis richteri Forel, and a hybrid of these two speci...

BACKGROUND Beach sand can harbor fecal indicator organisms and pathogens, but enteric illness risk associated with sand contact remains unclear. METHODS In 2007, visitors at 2 recreational marine beaches were asked on the day of their visit about sand contact. Ten to 12 days later, participants answered questions about health symptoms since the visit. F+ coliphage, Enterococcus, Bacteroidales...

I propose a new measure of common, time-varying tail risk for large cross sections of stock returns. Stock return tails are described by a power law in which the power law exponent is allowed to transition smoothly through time as a function of recent data. It is motivated by asset pricing theory and is estimable via quasi-maximum likelihood. Estimates indicate substantial time variation in sto...

In a distributed system, it is often important to detect the causal relationships between events, where event e1 is causally before event e2 if e1 happened before e2 and could possibly have aaected the occurrence of e2. In this paper we argue that it can be essential to security that a process determine, in the face of malicious attack, how two events are causally related. We formulate attacks ...

In this article, we present a particle filter (PF)-based track-before-detect (PF TBD) procedure for detection of extended objects whose shape is modeled by an ellipse. By incorporating of an existence variable and the target shape parameters into the state vector, the proposed algorithm performs joint estimation of the target presence/ absence, trajectory and shape parameters under unknown nuis...