Aim In the Indo-Pacific, the mass of islands of the Indonesian archipelago constitute a major biogeographical barrier (the Indo-Pacific Barrier, IPB) separating the Pacific and Indian oceans. Evidence for other, more localized barriers include high rates of endemism at the Marquesas and other isolated peripheral islands in the Pacific. Here we use mitochondrial-sequence comparisons to evaluate ...

Geophysical evidence strongly supports the complete isolation of India and Madagascar (Indo-Madagascar) by ∼100 million years ago, though sparse terrestrial fossil records from these regions prior to ∼70 million years ago have limited insights into their biogeographic history during the Cretaceous. A new theropod dinosaur, Dahalokely tokana, from Turonian-aged (∼90 million years old) strata of ...

This paper presents an analysis of the legal framework and regulatory approach of the United States (US) for preventing accidents in the development of the oil and gas resources of its outer continental shelf (OCS). Discussion is focused on prevention of major accidents which harm workers and the offshore and coastal environments, but also deals with some aspects of emergency response. Referenc...

A text can be considered as a one dimensional array of words. The locations of each word type in this array form a fractal pattern with certain fractal dimension. We observe that important words responsible for conveying the meaning of a text have dimensions considerably different from one, while the fractal dimensions of unimportant words are close to one. We introduce an index quantifying the...

The cosmological constant problem is seen as a symptom of the ambiguity of the Riemann curvature in general relativity. The solution of that ambiguity provided by Nash's theorem on gravitational perturbations along extra dimensions eliminate the direct comparison between the vacuum energy density and Einstein's cosmological constant, besides being compatible with the formation of structures and...