Purpose Mountaineering and related activities are increasingly becoming popular accompanied by an increase in medical incidents. Emergency operations mountainous terrain time-critical often pose major logistical challenges for rescuers. Drones expected to improve the operational performance of mountain However, they not yet widely used rescue missions. This paper examines determinants that driv...

SkyNET is a stealth network that connects hosts to a botmaster through a mobile drone. The network is comprised of machines on home Wi-Fi networks in a proximal urban area, and one or more autonomous attack drones. The SkyNET is used by a botmaster to command their botnet(s) without using the Internet. The drones are programmed to scour an urban area and compromise wireless networks. Once compr...

Although gene duplication is seen as the main path to evolution of new functions, molecular mechanisms by which selection favours the gain versus loss of newly duplicated genes and minimizes the fixation of pseudo-genes are not well understood. Here, we investigate in detail a duplicate honeybee gene obp11 belonging to a fast evolving insect gene family encoding odorant binding proteins (OBPs)....

Neotropical African honeybees (Apis mellifera scutellata), in the process of spreading throughout tropical and subtropical regions of the Americas, hybridize with and mostly replace European honeybees (primarily Apis mellifera mellifera and Apis mellifera ligustica). To help understand this process, we studied the effect of lineage (African, European, or hybrid) on the flight physiology of hone...

PREMISE OF THE STUDY Low-elevation surveys with small aerial drones (micro-unmanned aerial vehicles [UAVs]) may be used for a wide variety of applications in plant ecology, including mapping vegetation over small- to medium-sized regions. We provide an overview of methods and procedures for conducting surveys and illustrate some of these applications. METHODS Aerial images were obtained by fl...

Many environmental problems cover large areas, often in rough terrain constrained by natural obstacles, which makes intervention difficult. New technologies, such as unmanned aerial units, may help to address this issue. Due to their suitability to access and easily cover large areas, unmanned aerial units may be used to inspect the terrain and make a first assessment of the affected areas; how...

Time-Sensitive Distributed Systems (TSDS), such as applications using autonomous drones, achieve goals under possible environment interference (e.g., winds). Moreover, goals are often specified using explicit time constraints which must be satisfied by the system perpetually. For example, drones carrying out the surveillance of some area must always have recent pictures, i.e., at most M time un...

Iflavirus RNA was detected in honeybee colonies displaying unduly aggressive behavior and with no evidence of morphological alterations. Sequence analysis of the RNA-dependent RNA polymerase (RdRp) revealed that the iflavirus strain was more similar (> 99% aa) to Deformed Wing Virus (DWV), that has been associated with morphological alterations in bees, rather than to the newly-described Kakugo...

In the last decade, the differences in the information communication technology (ICT) infrastructures between urban and rural areas have registered a tremendous increase. ICT infrastructures could strongly help rural communities where many operations are time consuming, labor-intensive and expensive due to limited access and large distances to cover. One of the most attractive solutions, which ...