A laboratory study was carried out to investigate the single particle soil dust using aerosol time-of-flight mass spectrometry. The presence of crustal elements is observed in the mass spectra of individual particles. Potassium and iron constitute the two most commonly detected cations. Other common cations observed in the mass spectra of soil particles include sodium and magnesium. According t...

What engenders biodiversity? Natural selection certainly adapts species to their ecological niches, but does it really create all of the new niches and new species to ll them? Consider: the most successful, complex, and numerous species on earth are composed of sexually-reproducing animals and owering plants. Both groups typically undergo a form of sexual selection through mate choice: animals ...

Interaural time differences are an important cue for azimuthal sound localization. It is still unclear whether the same neuronal mechanisms underlie the representation in the brain of interaural time difference in different vertebrates and whether these mechanisms are driven by common constraints, such as optimal coding. Current sound localization models may be discriminated by studying the spe...

In order to gain an understanding of the effectiveness of phylogenetic Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC), it is important to understand how quickly the empirical distribution of the MCMC converges to the posterior distribution. In this article, we investigate this problem on phylogenetic tree topologies with a metric that is especially well suited to the task: the subtree prune-and-regraft (SPR) ...

MOTIVATION Mass spectrometry yields complex functional data for which the features of scientific interest are peaks. A common two-step approach to analyzing these data involves first extracting and quantifying the peaks, then analyzing the resulting matrix of peak quantifications. Feature extraction and quantification involves a number of interrelated steps. It is important to perform these ste...

Airports are important infra-structures for the air transportation business. One of the major operational constraints is the peaks of passengers in specific periods of time. Airline companies take into consideration the airport capacity when building the airline schedule and, because of that, the execution of the airline operational plan can contribute to improve or avoid airport peaks problems...