Copyright resides with the authors in terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 South African Licence. See: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.5/za Condition of use: The user may copy, distribute, transmit and adapt the work, but must recognise the authors and the South African Journal of Animal Science. _________________________________________________________________________________...

Slow strain rate test (SSRT) represent a dynamic slowly increasing strain imposed by an external means on uniaxial tension specimen according to ASTM G 129 standard. It is used for relatively rapid screening or comparative evaluation of environmental, processing or metallurgical variables that can affect resistance of material. Testing has been accomplished on low-alloyed boiler steel 14MoV6-3 ...

Social play is complicated to study because of its emergent, diverse, and inter-subjective nature. Since social psychology and sociology have studied human interactions in great detail and depth in real life, we propose that they can deepen our understandings of social game experience. Specifically, the interaction ritual theory (IR theory) from Micro-sociology that focuses on moment-to-moment ...

Relations among species in ecosystems can be represented by complex networks where both negative (competition) and positive (mutualism) interactions are concurrently present. Recently, it has been shown that many ecosystems can be cast into mutualistic networks, and that nestedness reduces effective inter-species competition, thus facilitating mutually beneficial interactions and increasing the...

Metaheuristic algorithms are used to solve NP-hard optimization problems. These algorithms have two main components, i.e. exploration and exploitation, and try to strike a balance between exploration and exploitation to achieve the best possible near-optimal solution. The bat algorithm is one of the metaheuristic algorithms with poor exploration and exploitation. In this paper, exploration and ...

Hypothesis: Under exploitative competition, unrelated parasites should reproduce at a faster rate than related parasites. Organisms: The parasitic nematode Steinernema carpocapsae and the insect host Galleria mellonella. Methods: We created ten replicate lines each of high-migration (unrelated) and low-migration (related) nematode populations, and allowed them to evolve for 20 host passages. Re...