© 2012 Khan et al., licensee InTech. This is an open access chapter distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Towards the Formulation of a Unified Data Mining Theory, Implemented by Means of Multia...

This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0) which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. pISSN 1011-8934 eISSN 1598-6357 WMA Guidelines on Promotional Mass Media Appearances by Phys...

Allocation of stored and incoming nutrients to reproduction determines an organism’s age-specific fecundity curve. In holometabolous insects, differences among species in the shape of the curve are correlated with differences in the potential importance of adult food to reproduction. I examined allocation patterns underlying this association. Specific changes throughout life in body mass and re...

To avoid a possible cost to their future survival and/or reproduction, individuals must balance their somatic and reproductive investments. The van Noordwijk and De Jong model of resource investment predicts that investments into reproduction and soma can vary among individuals of a population based on the variation in the total amount of energy that individuals acquire. With principal componen...

In several insect species, seminal fluid proteins (SFPs) have been demonstrated to be key regulators of male and female fitness through their ability to alter female physiology and behaviour. Tribolium castaneum is an economically important pest species and a model system for sexual selection research, but little is known about SFPs in this insect. To create a foundation for the study of T. cas...

Chronic hepatitis B virus (HBV) infection is a major cause of human suffering, and a number of mathematical models have examined within-host dynamics of the disease. Most previous HBV infection models have assumed that: (a) hepatocytes regenerate at a constant rate from a source outside the liver; and/or (b) the infection takes place via a mass action process. Assumption (a) contradicts experim...

During plant sexual reproduction, pollen germination and tube growth require development under tight spatial and temporal control for the proper delivery of the sperm cells to the ovules. Pollen tubes are fast growing tip-polarized cells able to perceive multiple guiding signals emitted by the female organ. Adhesion of pollen tubes via cell wall molecules may be part of the battery of signals. ...

We examine how litter mass in bats varies with respect to wing loading, an important aerodynamic aspect of flight. From geometric proportions, litter mass should scale to wing loading by an exponent of three. Conversely, analysis of aerodynamic consequences of carrying extra mass suggests that an exponent significantly less than three would be selectively advantageous. Our results show that Meg...