BACKGROUND In the Plio-Pleistocene, the hominin foot evolved from a grasping appendage to a stiff, propulsive lever. Central to this transition was the development of the longitudinal arch, a structure that helps store elastic energy and stiffen the foot during bipedal locomotion. Direct evidence for arch evolution, however, has been somewhat elusive given the failure of soft-tissue to fossiliz...

Decision making must be made within an appropriate context; we contend that such context is best represented by a hierarchy of states. The lowest levels of this hierarchy represent the observed raw data, or specific low-level behaviors and decisions. As we ascend the hierarchy, the states become increasingly abstract, representing higher order tactics, strategies, and over-arching mission goals...

Biological knowledge can be inferred from three major levels of information: molecules, organisms and ecologies. Bioinformatics is an established field that has made significant advances in the development of systems and techniques to organize contemporary molecular data; biodiversity informatics is an emerging discipline that strives to develop methods to organize knowledge at the organismal l...

A variation in the course of the thoracic duct was found in the cervical portion of a male cadaver during routine dissection of the head and neck region for undergraduate students. The thoracic duct, while arching laterally above the clavicle, was coursing posterior to the vertebral vein but anterior to the vertebral artery; it normally passes anterior to both the vertebral vein and artery. To ...

The cross-sectional echocardiographic features of mitral valve prolapse were defined in 26 children (ages 2-18 years) using a real-time, multiple-crystal ultrasound scanner. In each patient the physical findings of the mitral valve click-murmur syndrome were present and mitral valve prolapse had been diagnosed previously by conventional single crystal echocardiography. Mitral prolapse occurred ...

Our objective is to provide experimentalists with neuromechanical control hypotheses that can be tested with kinematic data sets. To illustrate the approach, we select legged animals responding to perturbations during running. In the following sections, we briefly outline our dynamical systems approach, state our over-arching hypotheses, define four neuromechanical control architectures (NCAs) ...

The profound benefits of altruism in modern society are self-evident. However, the potential hurtful aspects of altruism have gone largely unrecognized in scientific inquiry. This is despite the fact that virtually all forms of altruism are associated with tradeoffs--some of enormous importance and sensitivity--and notwithstanding that examples of pathologies of altruism abound. Presented here ...

Large-scale data mining is often aided with graphic visualizations to facilitate a better understanding of the data and results. This is especially true for visual data and highly detailed data too complex to be easily understood in raw forms. In this work, we present several of our recent interdisciplinary works in data mining solar image repositories and discuss the over-arching need for effe...

The arching phenomenon is an emergent pattern formed by a c-sized crowd of intelligent, goal-oriented, autonomous, heterogeneous individuals moving towards a w-wide exit along a long W -wide corridor, where W > w. We collected empirical data from microsimulations to identify the combination effects of c and w to the time T of the onset of and the size S of the formation of the arch. The arch ta...

Meniscus climbing using a fixed body posture has been well documented for various aquatic and neustonic insects, but is not known from small flying insects that inadvertently become trapped on water surfaces. Here, we show that thrips (order Thysanoptera) can ascend a meniscus by arching their non-wetting bodies to translate head-first and upward along a water surface; if initially oriented bac...