Direct and indirect effects of predators are highly variable in complex communities, and understanding the sources of this variation is a research priority in community ecology. Recent evidence indicates that herbivore community structure is a primary determinant of predation strength and its cascading impacts on plants. In this study, we use variation in herbivore community structure among pla...

The persistence of mutualisms despite the strong incidence of exploiters could be explained if exploiters deny one or more services (i.e., cheat) while eventually supplying some subtler but critical services. Pulp feeders usually ingest fruit reward without dispersing seeds and thus are considered to be mainly cheaters or thieves of seed-disperser mutualisms. By consuming the fruit pulp, howeve...

Interacting with nature is widely recognised as providing many health and well-being benefits. As people live increasingly urbanised lifestyles, the provision of food for garden birds may create a vital link for connecting people to nature and enabling them to access these benefits. However, it is not clear which factors determine the pleasure that people receive from watching birds at their fe...

Purpose: The aim of the current study was to investigate the effectiveness of schema therapy and mindfulness based cognitive therapy on the rate of using negative automatic thoughts in women with major depression in Mashhad. Participants were 36 depressed women clients, randomly selected and randomly designated to 3 groups (two experimental group and control group). Materials and method: This s...

800x600   introduction:  many items are needed for dressing including sterile dressing set, antiseptic and washing solutions, leucoplast tape, waste bin for infectious garbage, waste bin for noninfectious garbage, safe disposal trash for sharp cutting instruments, bedpan and sometimes drugs. all the items are laid out on a simple wheeled trolley. the multiplicity of items together with problems...

Development of generic differentiation protocols that function in a range of independently-derived human embryonic stem cell (hESC) lines remains challenging due to considerable diversity in culture methods practiced between lines. Maintenance of BG01 and HUES-7 has routinely been on mouse embryonic fibroblast (MEF) feeder layers using manual- and trypsin-passaging, respectively. We adapted bot...

Unpredictable resources in seasonal environments may favour innovative individuals that efficiently explore and exploit such resources. We tested the hypothesis that potential intraspecific abundance is a more powerful predictor of detection of a novel food source than interspecific abundance and predation risk. The hypothesis was tested using latency of Great Tits Parus major to find bird-feed...

Derivation of pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) induced from somatic cell types and the subsequent genetic modifications of disease-specific or patient-specific iPSCs are crucial steps in their applications for disease modeling as well as future cell and gene therapies. Conventional procedures of these processes require co-culture with primary mouse embryonic fibroblasts (MEFs) to support self-ren...

Article history: Received 14 August 2007 Revised 10 September 2008 Accepted 10 September 2008 The aim of the present study was to investigate preferences of piglets for diets varying in lysine (Lys) concentration andwhether those preferences are influenced by changing position of diets on offer in feeders. For this purpose, a feeding trial was carried out over a period of 5 weeks. Piglets (equa...