Two groups of 26 lambs were transported for 15 hours either on smooth highways or on rougher secondary roads. Nine of the animals in each group were monitored for heart rate and the plasma levels of cortisol, creatine kinase and lactate dehydrogenase, before the journey began, after four, eight and 12 hours and at slaughter. The pH of the meat was measured 45 minutes and 24 hours postmortem and...

We exploit historical data on planned highways, railroads, and exploration routes as sources of exogenous variation in order to estimate the effect of interstate highways on regional innovation: a 10% increase in a region’s stock of highways causes a 1.7% increase in regional patenting over a five-year period. In terms of the mechanism, we report evidence that roads facilitate local knowledge f...

We present a simple simulation of road growing dynamics that can generate global features as belt-ways and star patterns observed in urban transportation infrastructure. The road growing dynamics consist of two steps: Identifying the maximum transportation potential bewteen two locations within the city, followed by the generation of the least expensive road between these two locations. The sim...

endangered, the highest level of threat. But one of the real problems facing the IUCN is a lack of data. More than half the 44 cetacean species are considered “data deficient”, meaning future research on population numbers is a priority. And the worry is that more data could show more species in trouble. The blue whale, fin whale and sei whale all remain listed as endangered until more evidence...

The popularity of location-based services and the need to perform real-time processing on them has led to an interest in queries on road networks, such as finding shortest paths and finding nearest neighbors. The challenge here is that the efficient execution of operations usually involves the computation of distance along a spatial network instead of “as the crow flies,” which is not simple. T...