Breeding periodicity allows organisms to synchronise breeding attempts with the most favourable ecological conditions under which to raise offspring. For most animal species, ecological conditions vary seasonally and usually impose an annual breeding schedule on their populations; sub-annual breeding schedules will be rare. We use a 16-year dataset of breeding attempts by a tropical seabird, th...

Optical tracking systems pioneered the use of position sensors in surgical navigation. The requirement to maintain a clear line-of-sight between the emitters and detectors, however, renders them unsuitable for tracking flexible invasive instruments. On the other hand, advances in electromagnetic tracking systems permit a key-enabling role in imageguided procedures. First-generation magnetic sys...

Green turtles (Chelonia mydas) that shuttle between their Brazilian feeding grounds and nesting beaches at Ascension Island in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean are a paradigmatic case of long-distance oceanic migrants. It has been suggested that they calculate their position and the direction of their target areas by using the inclination and intensity of the earth's magnetic field. To test thi...

In the recent article ‘Who was James Lind, and what exactly did he achieve’, Iain Milne refers to John Woodall’s, the Surgeon General of the East India Company, book The Surgions Mate published in 1617. Woodall recommended ensuring that ‘There is a good quantity of lemon juice sent in each ship’. Bowen et al. in their book ‘Monsoon Traders: The maritime world of the East India Company’ recount ...

During the Shallow Water 2006 Experiment, SW06, a power supply for seabed-moored oceanographic equipment suffered an accidental explosion. The equipment was located on the New Jersey Shelf, 175 kilometers south-east of New York. Acoustic signals emitted by the explosion were detected by hydrophone sensors that form part of the International Monitoring System (IMS) of the Comprehensive Test-Ban ...

Ascension (Figs. 1, 2) is a recent volcanic island some 10 km in diameter lying at 07°57'S 14°22'W in the central tropical Atlantic Ocean 350 nautical miles south of the Equator. When discovered in 1501 it had a poor flora and terrestrial fauna, but many breeding seabirds presumably feeding along the equatorial current system (Bourne & Simmons 2001). The birds' destruction may have begun when B...

• 2003 introduced an algorithm that assigns unique IDs to chemical compounds. In 2003, Kasturi, Hamelberg, Liu and I showed that there is a natural graph algorithm that can assign essentially unique IDs to chemical compounds. We call these unique chemical IDs or UCKs [40]. The basic idea was to define certain classes of natural operations on labeled graphs. For example, one can assign a new (lo...

Alejandro Hossian, Enrique Sierra, Enrique Fernández, Paola Britos, Ramón García Martínez Departamento Electrotecnia. Facultad de Ingeniería. Universidad Nacional del Comahue Centro de Ingeniería del Software e Ingeniería del Conocimiento. Escuela de Postgrado. ITBA. Laboratorio de Sistemas Inteligentes. Facultad de Ingeniería. Universidad de Buenos Aires. [email protected], [email protected]...

One of the benefits of the comparative study of legal institutions is that it exposes the extent to which they are shaped by contingency as well as by logic or principle. What is regarded in one jurisdiction as the only possible or acceptable way of doing something is often revealed to be pure preconception. In other words, the comparative study of law can act as a balance to the unconscious et...

1 LIST OF ORIGINAL PAPERS 1 THE AUTHOR’S CONTRIBUTION 2 ABBREVIATIONS AND CONCEPTS USED IN THE THESIS AND THEIR DEFINITIONS 3