When operating walking machines, only a coordinated movement of all cylinders and/or motors can lead to safe, stable walking. The large hydraulically driven walking machine ALDURO, which is investigated in this paper, has no external power supply, and therefore the size of the on-board hydraulic power pack and its diesel engine is limited by its weight. When moving several cylinders with high s...

We study a model of “organized” criticality, where a single avalanche propagates through an a priori static (i.e., organized) sandpile configuration. The latter is chosen according to an i.i.d. distribution from a Borel probability measure ρ on [0, 1]. The avalanche dynamics is driven by a standard toppling rule, however, we simplify the geometry by placing the problem on a directed, rooted tre...

Plant parasitic nematodes impose losses of up to 70% on plantains and cooking bananas in Africa. Application of nematicides is inappropriate and resistant cultivars are unavailable. Where grown, demand for plantain is more than for other staple crops. Confined field testing demonstrated that transgenic expression of a biosafe, anti-feedant cysteine proteinase inhibitor and an anti-root invasion...

The present study compares all known species of Cylindrocladium that have clavate vesicles. Several isolates were obtained from baited soils collected in various parts of the world, while others were associated with leaf litter or symptomatic plant hosts. Isolates were compared based on morphology, as well as DNA sequence data from their beta-tubulin and histone gene H3 regions. Cylindrocladium...

The origin of self-organized criticality in a model without conservation law (Olami, Feder, and Christensen, Phys. Rev. Lett. 68, 1244 (1992)) is studied. The homogeneous system with periodic boundary condition is found to be periodic and neutrally stable. A change to open boundaries results in the invasion of the interior by a “self-organized” region. The mechanism for the self-organization is...