Many free-living animal species, including the majority of fish, insects, and amphibians, change their food and habitat during their life. Even though these ontogenetic changes in niche are common, it is not well understood which ecological conditions have favored the evolution of these shifts. Using an adaptive dynamics approach, we show that it is evolutionarily advantageous to switch to an a...

The recent application of monocentric lenses for panoramic high-resolution digital imagers raises the question of the achievable performance limits of this lens structure and of techniques for design optimization to approach these limits. This paper defines the important regions of the design space of moderate complexity monocentric lenses and describes systematic and global optimization algori...

Short interfering RNAs (siRNAs) are widely used as tool for gene inactivation in basic research and therapeutic applications. One of the major shortcomings of siRNA experiments are sequence-specific off-target effects. Such effects are largely unpredictable because siRNAs can affect partially complementary sequences and function like microRNAs (miRNAs), which inhibit gene expression on mRNA sta...

The CRISPR/Cas9 system is a bacteria immune system protecting cells from foreign genetic elements and has been modified to edit genomes in targeted locations. However, the risk of binding at off-target locations limits its power and thus it is necessary to identify these off-targets. Finding offtargets is computationally expensive, especially when allowing several mismatches. We present the CRI...

the main objective of this article is to optimize the walking pattern of a 2d humanoid robot with heel-off and toe-off motions in order to minimize the energy consumption and maximize the stability margin. to this end, at first, a gait planning method is introduced based on the ankle and hip joint position trajectories. then, using these trajectories and the inverse kinematics, the position tra...

Background. In the absence of standard pediatric prescribing information, clinicians often use medicines in an off-label way. Many studies have been published across the globe reporting different rates of off-label use. There is currently no study based on Indian drug formulary. Methods. The prospective observational study included pediatric patients in ages between 0 and 12 years admitted in a...

I t is widely accepted that ‘‘continuity of care’’ is vital to its quality and safety. The traditional approach to achieving this in the inpatient setting has been to minimize transfers among providers to reduce interruptions in the care process. In recent years the effort to limit duty hours for resident physicians (junior doctors) in the US, UK, and EU has highlighted the fact that continuity...