The environmental cycling of mercury (Hg) can be affected by natural and anthropogenic perturbations. Of particular concern is how these disruptions increase mobilization of Hg from sites and alter the formation of monomethylmercury (MeHg), a bioaccumulative form of Hg for humans and wildlife. The scientific community has made significant advances in recent years in understanding the processes ...

In this paper we propose a novel semantic label transfer method using supervised geodesic propagation (SGP). We use supervised learning to guide the seed selection and the label propagation. Given an input image, we first retrieve its similar image set from annotated databases. A Joint Boost model is learned on the similar image set of the input image. Then the recognition proposal map of the i...

The Stability and Growth Pact (SGP) has come in for severe criticism recently and has even been labelled "stupid" by the supposed guardian of its provisions, President of the European Commission Romano Prodi. A member of possible refinements have been proposed by several governments notably those of France and the United Kingdom as well as by many academic economists. Since most of these propos...

Repeated exposure to a novel physical environment eventually leads to a mature adaptive response whereby feedforward changes in motor output mirror both the amplitude and temporal structure of the environmental perturbations. However, adaptive responses at the earliest stages of learning have been found to be not only smaller, but systematically less specific in their temporal structure compare...

Diatoms are eukaryotic microalgae that are responsible for up to 40% of the ocean's primary productivity. How diatoms respond to environmental perturbations such as elevated carbon concentrations in the atmosphere is currently poorly understood. We developed a transcriptional regulatory network based on various transcriptome sequencing expression libraries for different environmental responses ...

As a step towards understanding pre-evolutionary organization in non-genetic systems, we develop a model to investigate the emergence and dynamics of proto-autopoietic networks in an interacting population of simple information processing entities (automata). Our simulations indicate that dynamically stable strongly connected networks of mutually producing communication channels emerge under sp...

Integration and modularity are fundamental determinants of how natural selection effects evolutionary change in complex multivariate traits. Interest in the study of the specific developmental basis of integration through experimental approaches is fairly recent and it has mainly focused on its genetic determinants. In this study, we present evidence that postnatal environmental perturbations c...

The evolutionary origins of genetic robustness are still under debate: it may arise as a consequence of requirements imposed by varying environmental conditions, due to intrinsic factors such as metabolic requirements, or directly due to an adaptive selection in favor of genes that allow a species to endure genetic perturbations. Stratifying the individual effects of each origin requires one to...