Birdsong is a widely used model for vocal learning and human speech, which exhibits high temporal and acoustic diversity. Rapid acoustic modulations are thought to arise from the vocal organ, the syrinx, by passive interactions between the two independent sound generators or intrinsic nonlinear dynamics of sound generating structures. Additionally, direct neuromuscular control could produce suc...

Today almost all ecosystems on Earth are directly or indirectly influenced by human activity. Most species occur in ecosystems that are managed by humans and only a small fraction of biodiversity exists in protected areas. Therefore, human dominated areas must also be considered for conservation of biodiversity. I have studied the effect of urbanization and green area management on bumble bees,...

background: exercise and consumption of green tea affect the aging process. however, the effect of exercise training combined with green tea extract on leukocyte telomere length, quality of life (qol) and body composition in aging has so far been unclear and inconsistent. objective: the aim of the present study was to determine the effectiveness of aerobic training intervention and green tea ex...

With a ever increasing growth of multimedia applications, security is an important issue in communication and storage of images, and encryption is one of the way to ensure security. Image encryption has applications in internet communication, multimedia systems, medical imaging, telemedicine and military communications. This paper proposes image encryption using secret sharing scheme. According...

The surf scoter (Melanitta perspicillata) is a little-studied species of North American sea duck. Estimates suggest it has experienced a precipitous decline in breeding numbers over the latter half of the past century. To investigate the potential role of contaminant uptake and toxicity in the population decline, this study undertook to measure blood chemistry, porphyrin concentrations, EROD, a...

Understanding avian grit-use behavior and the physical characteristics of grit particles that influence their consumption by birds can aid in formulating safer granular pesticides. Potential routes of avian exposure to granular pesticides include birds perceiving the granules as a source of grit and picking them up intentionally. Pesticides formulated on granules are used extensively in agricul...

The visual secret sharing (VSS for short) scheme is a secret image sharing scheme. A secret image is visually revealed from overlapping shadow images without additional computations. However, the contrast of reconstructed image is much lost. By means of the reversing operation (reverse black and white), Viet and Kurosawa used the traditional VSS scheme to design a VSS scheme which the secret im...