Aim The Andean superpáramo ecosystem, above c. 4200 m a.s.l., currently forms an archipelago of isolated ‘sky islands’ which provides a unique setting to study biogeography. However, there is still poor understanding how past geological events, together with climatic changes, have shaped the distribution life in this ecosystem. Our aim was investigate importance biogeographical barriers local d...

Phytoplankton form the base of most marine trophic chains and studying their past diversity at regional global scales can provide valuable insights into evolution ecosystems climate history. Using a new database more than 4000 species acritarchs prasinophytes, comprehensive investigation taxonomic trajectories this (micro)phytoplankton throughout Paleozoic is performed for first time. This data...

Abstract Background . There is a need for selective clinical candidates that allow testing of explicit precision medicine hypotheses emerging from diverse data acquisition, analysis and archiving initiatives. Candidates target pathophysiology progression mechanisms would offer the potential disease modification. Appropriate would, ideally, facilitate hypothesis in order to find right drug at do...

—One of the enduring puzzles to Stephen Jay Gould about life on Earth was the cause or causes of the fantastic diversity of animals that exploded in the fossil record starting around 530 Ma—the Cambrian explosion. In this contribution, we first review recent phylogenetic and molecular clock studies that estimate dates for high-level metazoan diversifications, in particular the origin of the maj...

The recent development in the field of "laser acceleration of protons and ions" has initiated several investigations of this concept of an innovative and compact accelerator. Unique features of the Laser Ion Source (LIS) are extremely high beam current and very low transverse and longitudinal beam emittances. A general disadvantage of the LIS is a huge spectrum of the proton energies. A simulat...

Viral Hemorrhagic Septicemia virus (VHSv) is an RNA rhabdovirus that causes one of the most important finfish diseases, affecting over 70 marine and freshwater species. It was discovered in European cultured fish in 1938 and since has been described across the Northern Hemisphere. Four strains and several substrains have been hypothesized, whose phylogenetic relationships and evolutionary radia...

GeoComputation is an evolving research field with a primary focus on exploring new modeling paradigms and techniques derived from advances in computation for the goal of enriching geographic analysis of highly complex, and often non-deterministic problems (Longley, 1998). Agent-based models, cellular automata, fuzzy sets, genetic algorithms, and neural networks have attracted attention as usefu...

In a perspectives article, Bromham et al.1 raise some important concerns about the use of both molecular and paleontological data in assessing the timing of diversification of extant mammalian orders. In Box 1, they describe well the need to differentiate crown (or more generally, nodebased) taxa from stem-based taxa. Unfortunately, their Fig. 2 is not clearly explained and thus confuses these ...

1 ABSTRACT An enduring challenge in ecology is to understand how diverse plant species coexist when competing for the same basic resources 1–4. Two candidate frameworks for meeting this challenge currently exist in forest ecology. Niche-based approaches succeed in describing successional dynamics in response to recurrent disturbances 5–9. Approaches based on Hubbell's neutral theory describe ab...

The generation of an organized architectural pattern during tissue formation is a process of paramount importance during development and organogenesis. A large proportion of the vertebrate body is made of epithelial tissues; these provide organized barriers between organ compartments and also differentiate into glandular, secretory specializations (Kahata et al., 2017). One feature of epithelia...