Based on culture isolation and morphological observation blight-infected pepper plants in Shaanxi Province, China, we identified the pathogen causing pepper phytophthora blight as Phytophthora capsici. Varieties that differed in resistance (CM334, PBC602, and B27) were inoculated with this pathogen. The root activity of resistant CM334 variety was the highest while that of susceptible B27 varie...

A defensive k-alliance in a graph is a set S of vertices with the property that every vertex in S has at least k more neighbors in S than it has outside of S. A defensive k-alliance S is called global if it forms a dominating set. In this paper we study the problem of partitioning the vertex set of a graph into (global) defensive k-alliances. The (global) defensive k-alliance partition number o...

We present in this paper a picture of the neural systems controlling defense that updates and simplifies Gray's "Neuropsychology of Anxiety". It is based on two behavioural dimensions: 'defensive distance' as defined by the Blanchards and 'defensive direction'. Defensive direction is a categorical dimension with avoidance of threat corresponding to fear and approach to threat corresponding to a...

Honeybee defensive behavior is a useful selection criterion, especially in areas with Africanized honeybees (Apis mellifera L). In all genetic improvement programs the selected characters must be measured with precision, and because of this we evaluated a metabolic method for testing honeybee defensive behavior in the laboratory for its usefulness in distinguishing between honeybee ecotypes and...

Previous research has demonstrated that defensive pessimists perform best when allowed to think about negative outcomes prior to performance. Two competing hypotheses could account for this phenomenon: negative states dissipate or are harnessed. Existing findings have not directly tested defensive pessimists’ experience during performance, which is critical for resolving the issue. To this end,...

Defensive responses to threatening stimuli are crucial to the survival of species. While expression of these responses is considered to be instinctive and unconditional, their magnitude may be affected by environmental and internal factors. The neural circuits underlying this modulation are still largely unknown. In mice, looming-evoked defensive responses are mediated by the superior colliculu...

The objective of the present study was to evaluate the response of social anxiety disorder (SAD) patients to threat scenarios. First-choice responses to 12 scenarios describing conspecific threatening situations and mean scores of defensive direction and defensive intensity dimensions were compared between 87 SAD patients free of medication and 87 matched healthy controls (HC). A significant ge...

UNLABELLED Defense is a basic survival mechanism when animals face danger. Previous studies have suggested that the midbrain periaqueductal gray (PAG) is essential for the generation of defensive reactions. Here we showed that optogenetic activation of neurons in the PAG in mice was sufficient to induce a series of defensive responses (including running, freezing, and avoidance). However, the e...

Instinctive defensive behaviors are essential for animal survival. Across the animal kingdom, there are sensory stimuli that innately represent threat and trigger stereotyped behaviors such as escape or freezing [1-4]. While innate behaviors are considered to be hard-wired stimulus-responses [5], they act within dynamic environments, and factors such as the properties of the threat [6-9] and it...

Basketball is a dualistic sport: all players compete on both offense and defense, and the core strategies of basketball revolve around scoring points on offense and preventing points on defense. However, conventional basketball statistics emphasize offensive performance much more than defensive performance. In the basketball analytics community, we do not have enough metrics and analytical fram...