A Plant Needs Ants like a Dog Needs Fleas: Myrmelachista schumanni Ants Gall Many Tree Species to Create Housing

Hundreds of tropical plant species house ant colonies in specialized chambers called domatia. When, in 1873, Richard Spruce likened plant-ants to fleas and asserted that domatia are ant-created galls, he incited a debate that lasted almost a century. Alth

The stripe-backed weasel Mustela strigidorsa: taxonomy, ecology, distribution and status

1. The stripe-backed weasel Mustela strigidorsa is one of the rarest and least-known mustelids in the world. Its phylogenetic relationships with other Mustela species remain controversial, though several unique morphological features distinguish it from congeners. 2. It probably lives mainly in evergreen forests in hills and mountains, but has also been recorded from plains forest, dense scrub, secondary forest, grassland and farmland. Known sites range in altitude from 90 m to 2500 m. Data are insufficient to distinguish between habitat and altitudes which support populations, and those where only dispersing animals may occur. 3. It has been confirmed from many localities in north-east India, north and central Myanmar, south China, north Thailand, north and central Laos, and north and central Vietnam. Given the limited survey effort, the number of recent records shows that the species is not as rare as hitherto believed. Neither specific nor urgent conservation needs are apparent.

Cosmological equations and thermodynamics on apparent horizon in thick braneworld

We derive the generalized Friedmann equation governing the cosmological evolution inside the thick brane model in the presence of two curvature correction terms: a four-dimensional scalar curvature from induced gravity on the brane, and a five-dimensional Gauss-Bonnet curvature term. We find two effective four-dimensional reductions of the generalized Friedmann equation in some limits and demonstrate that the reductions but not the generalized Friedmann equation can be rewritten as the first law of equilibrium thermodynamics on the apparent horizon of thick braneworld.

AN ORGANIC-PHASE ENZYME ELECTRODE BASED ON AN APPARENT DIRECT ELECTRON-TRANSFER BETWEEN A GRAPHITE ELECTRODE AND IMMOBILIZED HORSERADISH-PEROXIDASE

A mediatorless horseradish peroxidase (HRP) enzyme electrode operated in nonaqueous media is constructed by cryohydrogel immobilization.

Outer wave number spectrum and statistical distribution of apparent wave number vector

Based on the ray theory and Longuet-Higgins's linear,model of sea waves, the joint distribution of wave envelope and apparent wave number vector is established. From the joint distribution, we define a new concept, namely the outer wave number spectrum, to describe the outer characteristics of ocean waves. The analytical form of the outer wave number spectrum, the probability distributions of the apparent wave number vector and its components are then derived. The outer wave number spectrum is compared with the inner wave number spectrum for the average status of wind-wave development corresponding to a peakness factor P = 3. Discussions on the similarity and difference between the outer wave number spectrum and inner one are also presented in the paper. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.

Live-weight gain, apparent digestibility, and economic benefits of yaks fed different diets during winter on the Tibetan plateau

Our goal was to determine the effect of diets with different crude protein (CP) contents and metabolizable energy (W) levels on daily live-weight gain, apparent digestibility, and economic benefit of feedlot yaks on the Tibetan plateau during winter. Yaks were either 2- or 3-years old and randomly selected from the same herd. The 3-year-olds were placed into one of two experimental groups (A and B) and a control (CK1), and the two-year-olds were placed into one of three experimental groups (C, D and E) and a control (CK2) (N per group = 5). Yak in the control groups were allow graze freely, while those in the experimental groups yaks were fed diets higher in contains crude protein and metabolizable energy through a winter period inside a warming shed. Results indicated that live-weight gain of treatment groups was higher than their respective controls during experiment, and that daily live-weight gain of every 10 days among different treatments was significant difference (P < 0.05). In addition, apparent digestibility of different diets was linearly and positively related to feedlotting time, and feed conversion efficiency for A, C, D and E groups was quadratically related to feedlotting time (P < 0.01), however, feed conversion efficiency for B group was linearly and positively related to feedlotting time (P < 0.05). The economic benefit was 1.15 for A, 1.89 for B, 1.16 for C, 1.54 for D, and 4,52 for E. (c) 2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

三维非均匀各向异性介质中的纵波走时反演研究

Many observations show that seismic anisotropy is very common in the crust and upper mantle of the Earth. Seismic anisotropy can provide some clue about the changing and transporting process inside the earth. in recent years, abundant earthquake travel time data are accumulated, computers become more powerful, and these make the inversion of earthquake travel time data practical. In this thesis we studied the theory of elastic wave in anisotropic media, some formule for travel time inversion were derived. We present an iterative procedure to determine 21 elastic parameters from qP wave travel times. No a priori assumptions about heterogeneity and anisotropy of the model are made. The procedure is suitable for the case when we know nothing about the symmetry of anisotropy of the media, as well as for the case of earthquake travel time inversion which may contain various symmetry of anisotropy. The procedure is tested with a synthetic multiple-source offset VSP experiment. The results proved that the formulae are correct, and the procedure is practical. The results and the related theory indicate that the anisotropic inversion needs more rays than isotropic case. For a 2-D weak anisotropic (WA) medium, we need at least 5 rays in different directions to retrieve the elastic parameters on one grid point, and for a 3-D WA medium we need at least 15 rays in different directions to retrieve the elastic parameters on one grid point. The results also indicate that the starting background velocity has no influence on the final results, at least for the model we specified. Our results also show that insufficient illumination coverage will slow down the convergence rate, and make the results more sensitive to noise. We apply the procedure to a set of field travel time data. The data is from an artificial seismic observation. This observation is for locating micro-seismic events around a tunnel, its purpose is to find out if the digging process and the stress condition around the tunnel can generate micro-cracks. The size of this area is around 100m. The anisotropy derived from qP travel times is the same as the anisotropy showed by apparent velocities, and is also consistent with the anisotropy derived from S-wave splitting phenomena.