dubas bug, ommatissus lybicus de bergevin (hem.: tropiduchidae), is a key pest of date palms in iran.this pest was first reported on date palms in 1966 and has been established throughout the date producing regions in southern iran since. date palm is the only host plant of dubas bug. it attacks almost all date palm varieties, esp. mazafati variety in city of bam, kerman province and other vari...

A maple seed falls in a characteristic helical motion. A crude analogy with autorotation of a wind turbine suggests that the torque due to the aerodynamic force would initiate the gyration of the seed. We were therefore surprised that a seed with a torn wing gyrates in a similar manner as a full-winged seed. In fact, a seed with only a sliver of leading edge can still gyrate. Thus the gyrating ...

1. Electrical stimuli delivered to the brain were used to activate the giant fibre of Drosophila. 2. The giant fibre drove a prominent wing opening movement. 3. Intracellular microelectrode recordings from direct wing opener muscle fibres showed that giant fibre activation of an anterior pleural muscle, pa3, was responsible for the wing opening movement. 4. The giant fibre drove a slight wing e...

During development, the Drosophila wing primordium undergoes a dramatic increase in cell number and mass under the control of the long-range morphogens Wingless (Wg, a Wnt) and Decapentaplegic (Dpp, a BMP). This process depends in part on the capacity of wing cells to recruit neighboring, non-wing cells into the wing primordium. Wing cells are defined by activity of the selector gene vestigial ...

The Lyra mutation was first described by Jerry Coyne in 1935. Lyra causes recessive pupal lethality and adult heterozygous Lyra mutants exhibit a dominant loss of the anterior and posterior wing margins. Unlike many mutations that cause loss of wing tissue (e.g., scalloped, Beadex, cut, and apterous-Xasta), Lyra wing discs do not exhibit increased necrotic or apoptotic cell death, nor do they s...

Understanding the tensile strength properties and damage evolution mechanism in fissured rock is very important to fundamental research engineering design. The effects of flaw dip angle on strength, macroscopic crack propagation failure mode symmetrical Brazilian discs rock-like materials were investigated. A parallel bonding model was proposed examine pre-flawed under splitting load. microscop...

A mutant of Bombyx mori has wings with few scales and is named scaleless. We investigated the morphology of this mutant and found that it had many fewer wing scales than the corresponding wild type (WT) silkworm and that the remaining scales were smaller in shape with fewer furcations. Reciprocal transplantation of wing discs between scaleless and WT revealed that the WT wing disc could develop...

Inset appendages such as the wing and the leg are formed in response to inductive signals in the embryonic field. In Drosophila, cells receiving such signals initiate developmental programs which allow them to become imaginal discs. Subsequently, these discs autonomously organize patterns specific for each appendage. We here report that two related transcription factors, Escargot and Snail that...

The nubbin gene is required for normal growth and patterning of the wing in Drosophila. We report here that nubbin encodes a member of the POU family of transcription factors. Regulatory mutants which selectively remove nubbin expression from wing imaginal discs lead to loss of wing structures. Although nubbin is expressed throughout the wing primordium, analysis of genetic mosaics suggests a l...

INTRODUCTION Mass production of mosquitoes under laboratory conditions allows implementing methods to control vector mosquitoes. Colony development depends on mosquito size and weight. Body size can be estimated from its correlation with wing size, whereas weight is more difficult to determine. Our goal was to test whether wing size can predict the weight. METHODS We compared dry weight and w...