ELEPHANT CONTRACEPTION IS INCREASINGLY being identified as a solution to the problem of growing elephant numbers in conservation areas. As a result, it is now being incorporated into elephant management and policy in South Africa. We point out that elephant contraception may have numerous physical, social and ecological side-effects. These side-effects should be identified in advance and their ...

The ob gene was cloned in 1994 using the methodology of positional cloning. Leptin, the protein encoded by the ob gene, was identified in 1995 and shown to be a hormonal signal that regulates energy balance.14 Since its discovery 15 years ago, 30,943 articles on leptin have been written (S Korres, personal communication, 2009), providing an opportunity to assess, with some hindsight, the impact...

In the go/no-go lexical decision task (LDT), participants are instructed to respond as quickly as they can when a word is presented and not to respond if a nonword is presented. By minimizing part of the response selection process in the experimental task, the impact of response decision time on the obtained lexical decision time is probably reduced relative to the standard yes/no LDT (Gordon, ...

The article explores aspects of the role of prosody as a contextualization cue in aphasic conversation through auditory and acoustic analysis of an aphasic speaker's use of pitch variation in responses to closed yes/no-requests. The results reveal two prosodic realizations of 'yes' and 'no' contextualizing different kinds of responses: a flat realization with no prolongation and minimal pauses,...

Schott et al. (2007) have shown that the “tragedy of the commons” can be overcome when individuals share their output equally in groups of optimal size and there is no communication. The assignment to groups as either strangers or partners does not significantly affect this outcome. In this paper we investigate whether communication changes these results. Communication reduces shirking, increas...

for the first time in English an authentic treatise on this subject. Such a work could only be the product of a master of his subject and Palmer Findley has long been recognized as a leader in American Obstetrics. Bearing in mind that "History is the essence of innumerable biographies" the author has used this approach to the subject with great effectiveness. The great personalities of obstetri...

The authors show that the Mesoproterozoic (1.6-1.0 bn year before present) was no “boring billion” but a “bustling billion” - not only with Stromatolites and their apex in the Calymmian and Ectasian but also with the presence of multicellular organisms. To make it visible a graphical reconstruction was created. For a long time, it was assumed that there existed no noteworthy biosphere on Earth ...

Let P be a set of n points in d-dimensional Euclidean space, where each of the points has integer coordinates from the range [−∆, ∆], for some ∆ > 1. Let ε > 0 be a given parameter. We show that there is subset Q of P , whose size is polynomial in (log ∆/ε), such that for any k slabs that cover Q, their ε-expansion covers P. In this result, k and d are assumed to be constants. The set Q can als...

e s asectomy is the safest and most dependable method of permanent contraception available o men today. More than 500,000 vasectomies are erformed in the United States and more than 5,000 in Canada each year. Of American married ouples, 7% to 10% choose vasectomy as their form f birth control. This has made vasectomy the most ommon urologic procedure in North America.1–3 Although vasectomy is a...