The shade avoidance syndrome (SAS) allows plants to anticipate and avoid shading by neighbouring plants by initiating an elongation growth response. The phytochrome photoreceptors are able to detect a reduction in the red:far red ratio in incident light, the result of selective absorption of red and blue wavelengths by proximal vegetation. A shade-responsive luciferase reporter line (PHYB::LUC)...

Most software development projects rely on Integrated Development Environments (IDEs) based on the desktop paradigm, with an interactive, mouse-driven user interface. The standard installation of ACL2, on the other hand, is designed to work closely with Emacs. ACL2 experts, on the whole, like this mode of operation, but students and other new programmers who have learned to program with desktop...

A nationwide and demographically representative sample of 1,166 people responded to a survey exploring choices for a favorite movie monster and reasons underlying the choice. Results of the study indicated that, irrespective of demographics, the vampire is the king of monsters. With a few exceptions (e.g., Chucky, Dracula and sexiness), males and females were generally attracted to the same mon...

Plants are organisms whose great biological distance from humans has aroused cultural interest as powerful and/or dangerously unfamiliar creatures, especially during the Victorian period. «The Flowering of Strange Orchid» (1894), by Herbert George Wells, tells how an orchid collector is attacked to near death his latest acquisition. The plant attacks human with its «tentacle-like aerial rootlet...

The rapid growth of urban areas has deserved special attention from the technical and scientific community over the last decades. Traffic and transportation systems have been a subject of special concern as they play an important and indispensable role in today’s society. Heterogeneity and uncertainty have become even more evident, and researchers have been challenged by how to cope with modell...

This paper argues for an approach within the medical humanities that draws on the theoretical legacy of cultural materialism as a framework for reading cultural practices and their relationship to the social and economic order. It revisits the origins and development of cultural materialism in cultural studies and literary studies between the 1970s and 1990s and considers how, with adaptation, ...

Spiders are ecologically important predators with complex venom and extraordinarily tough silk that enables capture of large prey. Here we present the assembled genome of the social velvet spider and a draft assembly of the tarantula genome that represent two major taxonomic groups of spiders. The spider genomes are large with short exons and long introns, reminiscent of mammalian genomes. Phyl...

We present an approach based on inductive theorem proving for verifying invariance properties of systems specified in Rewriting Logic, an executable specification language implemented (among others) in the Maude tool. Since theorem proving is not directly available for rewriting logic, we define an encoding of rewriting logic into its membership equational (sub)logic. Then, inductive theorem pr...