Diana Seymour

Diana Bratu

Social familiarity affects Diana monkey (Cercopithecus diana diana) alarm call responses in habitat-specific ways.

Male Diana monkeys produce loud and acoustically distinct alarm calls to leopards and eagles that propagate over long distances, much beyond the immediate group. Calling is often contagious, with neighbouring males responding to each other's calls, indicating that harem males communicate both to local group members and distant competitors. Here, we tested whether male Diana monkeys responding t...

Seymour Benzer 1921–2007

It is now common knowledge that both “Nature” and “Nurture” determine animal behavior. But even as late as the 1970s, the concept that genes have anything to do with behavior was not universally accepted. In the face of such skepticism, Seymour Benzer, working tirelessly at Caltech, refused to join the philosophical debate and, in the way so familiar to those who knew him, shrugged his shoulder...

Seymour Benzer (1921–2007)

The style of scientific giants differs at least as much as their interests. Seymour Benzer, who died in Pasadena on Novem-ber 30, 2007, at the age of 86, was made of the stuff of the great restless explorers. But unlike the Cooks and Magellans, he never waited for a monarch's approval to sail, nor did he claim sovereignty over the new territory. With admirable drive, curiosity , and tenacity, h...

Solving the seymour problem

Optimization problems are at the heart of much of operations research and can vary substantially both in complexity and size. In many problems, the sheer size of the instance makes it very difficult to solve due to time or space limitations. In others, the complexity of the problem (nonlinearities, nonconvexities, or discreteness) can make it difficult or impossible to solve to optimality, even...