Determinations of soil moisture and sediment availability in arid regions are important indicators of local climate variability and the potential for future dust storm events desertification. Data from the Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection (ASTER) radiometer are used to derive the relationships amongst potential soil erosion, soil moisture and thermal inertia (TI) at the spati...

Difficulties in acquiring a complete aerial photography coverage on a regular basis in the Brazilian Amazon due to adverse environmental conditions affect the quality of the national topographic database. As a consequence, topographic information is still poor, and when available needs to be up-dated or re-mapped. In this research, altimetric information derived from RADARSAT-1 (Fine and Standa...

The 1:50.000 topographic maps present a nominal horizontal accuracy of 20 meters and a nominal vertical accuracy of 10 meters with 90% confidence. The data were in most cases extracted with photogrammetric techniques from aerial stereo-photographs during the 80’s. The usual update rate for these maps ranges from ten to twenty years. The Advanced Spaceborn Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiome...

Recent in vivo as well as in vitro experiments have indicated that microtubule pushing alone is sufficient to position a microtubule-organizing center within a cell. Here, we investigate the effect of catastrophes on the dynamics of microtubule asters within microfabricated chambers that mimic the confining geometry of living cells. The use of a glass bead as the microtubule-organizing center a...

Since 1983, study of natural selection has relied heavily on multiple regression of fitness on the values for a set of traits via ordinary least squares (OLSs), as proposed by Lande and Arnold, to obtain an estimate of the quadratic relationship between fitness and the traits, the fitness surface. However, well-known statistical problems with this approach can affect inferences about selection....

[1] This study presents a comprehensive statistical overview of the macrophysical properties of trade wind cumulus clouds over the tropical western Atlantic using 152 scenes taken from the Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer (ASTER) between September and December 2004. The size distribution, shapes, and spatial distribution of cumulus clouds were examined with ASTER n...

A recent Announcement of Collaborative Opportunity (AOCO) [1], offers an invitation to interested parties to participate in an exercise to validate the new ASTER Global DEM (GDEM). At the time of this abstract submission, the ASTER GDEM has not yet been released but is expected to be available for validation purposes in early 2009 and for general use later in 2009. The validation program is co-...

Following fertilization, the Xenopus egg cortex rotates relative to the cytoplasm by 30 degrees about a horizontal axis. The direction of rotation, and as a result the orientation of the embryonic body axes, is normally specified by the position of sperm entry. The mechanism of rotation appears to involve an array of aligned microtubules in the vegetal cortex (Elinson and Rowning, 1988, Devl Bi...