Dispersing billiards introduced by Sinai are uniformly hyperbolic and have strong statistical properties (exponential decay of correlations and various limit theorems). However, if the billiard table has cusps (corner points with zero interior angles), then its hyperbolicity is nonuniform and statistical properties deteriorate. Until now only heuristic and experiments results existed predicting...

Artificial light at night (ALAN) is gaining recognition as having an important anthropogenic impact on the environment, yet the behavioural and physiological impacts of this stressor are largely unknown. This dearth of information is particularly true for freshwater ecosystems, which are already heavily impacted by anthropogenic pressures. Atlantic salmon (Salmo salar L.) is a species of conser...

Theories on R&D organisation draw on globalisation literature as well as on communication theories. This mixed discourse is a problem, since mixing levels of logic sometimes cause faulty conclusions. How is this double logic handled in organisations, and what is the effect on R&D organisation? This study investigates R&D activities in multinational companies with several production sites and ma...

The presence of an endogenous circadian clock in the brain of an animal was first demonstrated in the cockroach Leucophaea maderae. However, the clock's cellular basis remained elusive until pigment-dispersing hormone-immunoreactive neurons, which express the clock genes period and timeless in Drosophila, were proposed as pacemaker candidates. In several insect species, pigment-dispersing hormo...

This work describes the application of ultrasound-assisted matrix solid-phase dispersion as an extraction and sample preparation approach for aflatoxins (B1, B2, G1 and G2) and subsequent determination of them by high-performance liquid chromatography-fluorescence detection. A Box-Behnken design in combination with response surface methodology was used to determine the affecting parameters on t...

An antiserum against the crustacean neuropeptide pigment-dispersing hormone stains a small set of neurons in the optic lobes of several hemimetabolous and holometabolous insects. These cells, the primary branches of which in the optic lobe lie in the accessory medulla, fulfill several criteria predicted for neurons of the circadian clock. For example, in fruit flies they express timeless and pe...

A challenge in managing vector-borne zoonotic diseases in human and wildlife populations is predicting where epidemics or epizootics are likely to occur, and this requires knowing in part the likelihood of infected insect vectors dispersing pathogens from existing infection foci to novel areas. We measured prevalence of an arbovirus, Buggy Creek virus, in dispersing and resident individuals of ...

Paving asphalts are often judged and selected based on their rheological behavior at prescribed temperatures or aging response. Asphalts are considered as a colloidal mixture, where clusters of polar, aromatic molecules are dispersed in a less polar solvents. Thus, the extent to which the solvent phase disperses the associating molecules will determine many of the fundamental asphalt properties...

Surface modification, particularly coatings deposition, is beneficial to tissue-engineering applications. In this work, bioactive glass/zirconium titanate composite thin films were prepared by a sol-gel spin-coating method. The surface features of the coatings were studied by scanning electron microscopy, atomic force microscopy, and spectroscopic reflection analyses. The results show that unif...