Many animals, including humans, rely on active tactile sensing to explore the environment and negotiate obstacles, especially in the dark. Here, we model a descending neural pathway that mediates short-latency proprioceptive information from a tactile sensor on the head to thoracic neural networks. We studied the nocturnal stick insect Carausius morosus, a model organism for the study of adapti...

Predators and competitors of vertebrates can in theory reduce the density of infected nymphs (DIN)-an often-used measure of tick-borne disease risk-by lowering the density of reservoir-competent hosts and/or the tick burden on reservoir-competent hosts. We investigated this possible indirect effect of predators by comparing data from 20 forest plots across the Netherlands that varied in predato...

The objectives of this article are to study the sum IS(d) and to find some upper din bounds for Smarandache's function. This sum is proved to satisfy the inequality IS(d) ~ n at most all the composite numbers, Using this inequality, some new din upper bounds for Smarandache's function are found. These bounds improve the well-known inequality Sen) ~ n.

In this paper we investigate the image of the l-adic representation attached to the Tate module of an abelian variety over a number field with endomorphism algebra of type I or II in the Albert classification. We compute the image explicitly and verify the classical conjectures of Mumford-Tate, Hodge, Lang and Tate, for a large family of abelian varieties of type I and II. In addition, for this...

In this paper it is shown that any regular critical point of the Mumford-Shah functional, with positive definite second variation, is an isolated local minimizer with respect to competitors which are sufficiently close in the L1 -topology.