Mechanisms for the spread of transmissible spongiform encephalopathy diseases, including chronic wasting disease (CWD) in North American cervids, are incompletely understood, but primary routes include horizontal and environmental transmission. Birds have been identified as potential vectors for a number of diseases, where they ingest or are exposed to infected material and later shed the disea...

Increasingly sophisticated hominin cognition is assumed to play an important role in major dispersal events but it is unclear what that role is. We present an agent-based model showing that there is a close relationship between level of foresight, environmental heterogeneity, and population dispersibility. We explore the dynamics between these three factors and discuss how they may affect the c...

Two competing consumer species may coexist using a single homogeneous resource when the more efficient consumer--the one having the lowest equilibrium resource density--has a more nonlinear functional response that generates consumer-resource cycles. We extend this model of nonequilibrium coexistence, as proposed by Armstrong and McGehee, by putting the interaction into a spatial context using ...

Dispersal of organisms may play an essential role in the coexistence of species. Recent studies of the evolution of dispersal in temporally varying environments suggest that clones differing in dispersal rates can coexist indefinitely. In this work, we explore the mechanism permitting such coexistence for a model of dispersal in a patchy environment, where temporal heterogeneity arises from end...

We show that all so(N)_{1} universality class quantum criticalities emerge when one-dimensional generalized cluster models are perturbed with Ising or Zeeman terms. Each critical point is described by a low-energy theory of N linearly dispersing fermions, whose spectrum we show to precisely match the prediction by so(N)_{1} conformal field theory. Furthermore, by an explicit construction we sho...

Bacterial biofilms are a complex architecture of cells that grow on moist interfaces, and are held together by a molecular glue of extracellular proteins, sugars and nucleic acids. Biofilms are particularly problematic in human healthcare as they can coat medical implants and are thus a potential source of disease. The enzymatic dispersal of biofilms is increasingly being developed as a new str...

The steam reforming of dimethyl ether (SRD) has been proved to be one the most promising routes for on-site H2 production. However, two-step consecutive nature SRD reaction makes design an efficient bifunctional catalyst a challenge. Herein, series Cu incorporated into amorphous silica–alumina (Cu–ASA) as integrated catalysts were synthesized by single-step complex decomposition method, and amm...

The phase change thermal control method is now widely used in aircraft thermal protection due to its high energy density, constant temperature control, flexible operation, and many other advantages.1–6 However, thermal conductivity of most current phase change materials is low in phase transition process.7–10 This paper will add high thermal nanoparticles to phase change material in order to en...