Contagious parthenogenesis-a process involving rare functional males produced by a parthenogenetic lineage which mate with coexisting sexual females resulting in fertile parthenogenetic offspring-is one of the most striking mechanisms responsible for the generation of new parthenogenetic lineages. Populations of the parthenogenetic diploid brine shrimp Artemia produce fully functional males in ...

This paper summarizes a function-based approach to model and animate 2D and 3D flows. We use periodic functions to create cyclical animations that represent 2D and 3D flows. These periodic functions are constructed with an extremely simple algorithm from a set of oriented lines. The speed and orientation of the flow are described directly by the orientation and the lengths of these oriented lin...

Reported cases of cyclical Cushing's syndrome are rare. Of 14 successive patients with Cushing's syndrome nine collected sequential urine samples for the estimation of cortisol:creatinine ratio. Five had cyclical Cushing's syndrome while two had considerable variation in urinary cortisol excretion without a cyclical pattern being established. Two of the five patients with a cyclical syndrome ha...

Mammalian parthenogenesis could not survive but aborted during mid-gestation, presumably because of lack of paternal gene expression. To understand the molecular mechanisms underlying the failure of parthenogenesis at early stages of development, we performed global gene expression profiling and functional analysis of parthenogenetic blastocysts in comparison with those of blastocysts from norm...

Wolbachia is an intracellular symbiont of invertebrates responsible for inducing a wide variety of phenotypes in its host. These host-Wolbachia relationships span the continuum from reproductive parasitism to obligate mutualism, and provide a unique system to study genomic changes associated with the evolution of symbiosis. We present the genome sequence from a parthenogenesis-inducing Wolbachi...

Aphids exhibit a form of phenotypic plasticity, called polyphenism, in which genetically identical females reproduce sexually during one part of the life cycle and asexually (via parthenogenesis) during the remainder of the life cycle. The molecular basis for aphid parthenogenesis is unknown. Cytological observations of aphid parthenogenesis suggest that asexual oogenesis evolved either through...

Cyclical mastalgia is a common complaint, with a potentially important relationship to breast cancer risk. In the last decade, case-control studies have reported that cyclical mastalgia could be considered as an independent risk factor for breast cancer. The subjectivity of a retrospectively collected symptom questioned the validity of this finding. We have examined the association between cycl...