Geographic variation of flower size is potentially affected by various biotic and abiotic factors such as pollinator size, abundance of nectar robbers, and temperature. To elucidate the effect of geographic variation of flower-visitor fauna on flower size, we investigated two spring-flowering, bumblebee-pollinated herbs, Lamium album L. var. barbatum (seven populations) and Meehania urticifolia...

Diversification in flower shape and function is triggered by the high plasticity of flower meristems. Minute changes in space and time can profoundly affect the formation of adult structures. Dipsacoideae provides an excellent model system to investigate the evolutionary aspects of temporal and spatial changes in flower development due to its small size, the resolved phylogenetic framework, and...

Herein, we report a facile synthesis, characterization and dye sensitized solar cell (DSSC) application of flower-shaped ZnO nanostructures. The flower-shaped ZnO nanostructures were synthesized by low-temperature hydrothermal process and characterized in detail by several techniques. The detailed morphological studies confirmed that the flower-shaped structures are formed by the accumulation o...

Flower pollination is an intriguing process in the natural world. Its evolutionary characteristics can be used to design new optimization algorithms. In this paper, we propose a new algorithm, namely, flower pollination algorithm, inspired by the pollination process of flowers. We first use ten test functions to validate the new algorithm, and compare its performance with genetic algorithms and...

Approximating a general formula from above and below by Horn formulas (its Horn envelope and Horn core, respectively) was proposed by Selman and Kautz (1991, 1996) as a form of \knowledge compilation," supporting rapid approximate reasoning; on the negative side, this scheme is static in that it supports no updates, and has certain complexity drawbacks pointed out by Kavvadias, Papadimitriou an...

Given a family of Horn clauses, what is the minimal number of Horn clauses implying all other clauses in the family? What is the maximal number of Horn clauses from the family without having resolvents of a certain kind? We consider various problems of this type, and give some sharp bounds. We also consider the probability that a random family of a given size implies all other clauses in the fa...

In this paper we introduce a new approach for revising and merging consistent Horn formulae under minimal model semantics. Our approach is translation-based in the following sense: we generate a propositional encoding capturing both the syntax of the original Horn formulae (the clauses which appear or not in them) and their semantics (their minimal models). We can then use any classical revisio...