Various mechanisms in flowering plants have evolved to prevent the tendency of self-fertilization created by close proximity of male and female reproductive organs in a perfect flower. One such mechanism, called self-incompatibility (SI), allows the pistil of a plant to reject self pollen or pollen from genetically related individuals, thus preventing inbreeding and promoting outcrosses. Geneti...

Bitumen as a binder in coating and insulating materials is modified with polymers to improve its performance in service conditions. Almost all polymers are incompatible with bitumen, and at high temperatures due to relatively very low viscosity of the bitumen phase, are separated from it. These lead to a considerable limitation in the use and handling of polymer-modified bitumens. An understand...

35 Previously, we introduced a monkey model for human frontal midline 36 theta oscillations, as a possible neural correlate of attention. It was based on 37 homologous theta oscillations found in the monkey's prefrontal and anterior 38 cingulate cortices (areas 9 and 32) in a self-initiated hand-movement task. 39 However, it has not been confirmed whether theta activity in the monkey 40 model c...

A large proportion of mutants with altered pigment features have been obtained via exposure to heavy-ion beams, a technique that is efficient for trait improvement in the breeding of plants and algae. However, little is known about the underlying mechanisms by which the photosynthetic pigments are altered by heavy-ion irradiation. In our study, the photosynthetic characteristics of progenies fr...

In π-conjugated chain molecules such as carotenoids, coupling between electronic and vibrational degrees of freedom is of central importance. It governs both dynamic and static properties, such as the time scales of excited state relaxation as well as absorption spectra. In this work, we treat vibronic dynamics in carotenoids on four electronic states (|S0⟩, |S1⟩, |S2⟩, and |Sn⟩) in a physicall...

We study the integration of stable marriage problems (SMPs) of equal sizes into an extended society. We show that it is impossible to make every agent weakly better off by merging all SMPs if the matching that occurs before and after integration is stable. We show that integration always weakly benefits at least one-half of the society, which implies that it can be implemented by majority votin...

Microchimerism refers to the status of harboring cells from another individual at low levels. It is well known that cells traffic bidirectionally between fetus and mother during pregnancy. This situation resembles a naturally occurring long lasting fetal stem cell transplantation. The fetus acts as the donor and the mother acts as the recipient. To study the role of microchimerism in tissue reg...

The purpose of the study was to investigate the effects of load on the net moment response at the L5/S1 joint during simulated slip events. Six young individuals were instructed to take one step with a handheld load. Sudden floor movement was randomly introduced to simulate unexpected slips. Different loads conditions (0%, 10%, 20%, 30% of body weight) were introduced at random. Three-dimension...