During chordate evolution, two genome-wide duplications facilitated acquisition of vertebrate traits, including emergence of neural crest cells (NCCs), in which neofunctionalization of the duplicated genes are thought to have facilitated development of craniofacial structures and the peripheral nervous system. How these duplicated genes evolve and acquire the ability to specify NC and their der...

Abstract The presence of offsets, appearing at intervals ranging from 10s to 100s kilometres, is a distinct characteristic constructive tectonic plate margins. By comparison, boundaries associated with subduction exhibit uninterrupted continuity. Here, we present global mantle convection calculations that result in mobile lithosphere featuring dynamically derived exhibiting contrasting superfic...

Indian Ocean is known as a source of moisture for southeast of Iran due to summer precipitation. In this study, in order to investigate the role of SST of Indian Ocean, and the convergence and divergence fields in the precipitation of southeast of Iran, precipitation data of five synoptic stations were used during 2000-2010, including Iranshahr, Khash, ChahBahar, Zabul, and Saravan. To investig...

The opening of the South Atlantic Ocean is one of the most extensively researched problems in plate kinematics. Models of it have proliferated since Bullard, Everett and Smith [8] published the first-ever computer-assisted reconstruction in the 60s. In recent years, focus has shifted to understanding the early stages of continental separation. General agreement exists about ocean opening being ...

There is a widespread misconception within the spatial science community that the three geocentric datums widely used in Australia, GDA94, ITRF and WGS84 are identical “for all practical purposes”. This is a fair assumption for navigation and many mapping purposes, however users of wide area differential GPS and precise positioning services with a precision of less than a metre are beginning to...

in this paper, a nonlinear free vibration analysis of thin annular functionally graded (fg) plate integrated with two uniformly distributed actuator layers made of piezoelectric (pzt4) material on the top and bottom surfaces of the annular fg plate is presented based on kirchhoff plate theory. the material properties of the fgm core plate are assumed to be graded in the thickness direction acco...

Aim The species-rich family of true toads (Anura: Bufonidae) has been the focus of several earlier studies investigating the biogeography of geographically widespread taxa. Herein, we employ newly developed Bayesian divergence estimate methods to investigate the biogeographical history of this group. Resulting age estimates are used to test several key temporal hypotheses including that the ori...