the most important quality indicator of fruits is the flesh firmness which is well correlated to their young’s modulus. in this research variation of vibration characteristics (shape modes, natural frequency) of apple due to change of material characteristics (density, young's models, poisson ratio) and apple volume was investigated using finite element simulation. an image processing technique...

We applied multivariate analyses to an array of body measures of alpine newt specimens derived from 11 local populations in Greece to describe, analyse and detect patterns and putative causes of within-population and among-population morphometric variation. The observed morphometric variation was partitioned into several independently varying aspects of the external phenotype, frequently follow...

spur dike is an important element for protection of river banks. spur dike causes variations in flow field, sediment transport and bed topography. the mechanism of flow and sediment transport in a channel bend is very complex, especially when a spur dike is constructed in a bend. in this paper the time variations of dimension of the scour hole and the bed’s topography were considered around a t...

In this paper we present a method for constraining the deformations of Snakes (Active Contour Models) when segmenting a known class of objects. The method we propose is similar to both Active Shape Models (ASM) but without the landmark identification and correspondence requirement, and to Active Contour Models (ACM), but armed with a priori information about shape variation. Rather than represe...

The method of object symmetry (Mardia et al. 2000) has been elaborated for the studies of shape variation in structures that have an internal plane of bilateral symmetry (e.g. vertebrate skulls and insect bodies). Further work related object symmetry to the structure of the shape tangent space (Kolamunnage & Kent 2003, 2005). For instance, principal component analysis (PCA) can separate a compo...

In this article, nonuniformity effects on free vibration analysis of functionally graded beams is discussed. variation in material properties is modeled after Powerlaw and exponential models and the non-uniformity is assumed to be exponentially varying in the width along the beams with constant thickness. Analytical solution is achieved for free vibration with simply supported conditions. It is...

The hominin fossils of Dmanisi, Republic of Georgia, present an ideal means of assessing levels of skeletal size and shape variation in a fossil hypodigm belonging to the genus Homo because they have been recovered from a spatially and temporally restricted context. We compare variation in mandible size and shape at Dmanisi to that of extant hominoids and extinct hominins. We use height and bre...

A replicated pattern of habitat-associated morphology among different lineages may represent adaptive convergence. Deviation from the replicated (shared) pattern of diversification reflects unique (e.g. species specific) effects resulting from siteor species-specific selection, intrinsic factors (e.g. G matrix differences) or chance historical events (e.g. genetic drift). For two distantly-rela...

Shape variation is widespread in nature and embodies both a response to and a source for evolution and natural selection. To detect patterns of shape evolution, one must assess the quantitative genetic underpinnings of shape variation as well as the selective environment that the organisms have experienced. Here we used geometric morphometrics to assess variation in plastron shell shape in 1314...

Background: RNA plays key role in many aspects of biological processes and its tertiary structure is critical for its biological function. RNA secondary structure represents various significant portions of RNA tertiary structure. Since the biological function of RNA is concluded indirectly from its primary structure, it would be important to analyze the relations between the RNA sequences and t...