“We’re related to the grass”, our biology teacher once proclaimed in his South Tyrolean accent that was at the same time unmistakable and highly liable to impersonation. Our 14-year-old, hormone-clouded minds can perhaps be forgiven for not immediately fathoming the profound scientifi c truth behind this statement, but looking back now, it stuck as poignant way of encapsulating what is perhaps ...

The nature of weeds is a complex adaptive, soil-seed communication system. The nature of weedy Setaria life history is an adaptable, changeable system in which complex behaviors emerge when self-similar plant components self-organize into functional traits possessing biological information about spatial structure and temporal behavior. The nature of the weedy Setaria is revealed in the physical...

Gregor Mendel’s paper “Experiments on Plant Hybrids” (1866) has become a paradigmatic case in the historiography of life sciences because production and reception “discovery” sharply fell apart, thus raising fundamental questions about relationship between scientific achievement “its” time. In this chapter, I am providing an overview answers that have been given to these by various historians. ...

Morphological evolution is influenced by a wide variety of processes, at levels that likely range from molecules to communities, or even ecosystems. The relative contributions of these processes and other biological properties to morphological evolution in individual lineages, and their ultimate role in mediating the evolutionary success of these groups, remain fundamental problems in evolution...

A comparative study of the corresponding styles of Western and Iranian modern architecture has hardly ever been carried out in detail. This paper aims to sketch out an outline for such an investigation and to present a summary of empirical evidence accompanied by field observations to elaborate the ongoing trend of relationship between architectural styles in Iran and that of the West. This is ...

Background: The hemodialysis patients, who are able to make better use of adaptive techniques, accept the treatment easier and will have a higher quality of life. Aim: The aim of this study was to measure the effect of training of coping methods (problem-focused and emotion-focused) on quality of life in hemodialysis patients. Methods: This was a one-group before- after quasi-experimental desig...

We describe the impact of recent life-history plasticity theory on insect studies, particularly on the interface between genetics and plasticity. We focus on the three-dimensional relationship between three key life-history traits: adult size (or mass), development time and growth rate, and the connections to life cycle regulation, host plant choice, and sexual selection in seasonal environment...