Sea turtles are capable of navigating across large expanses of ocean to arrive at remote islands for nesting, but how they do so has remained enigmatic. An interesting example involves green turtles (Chelonia mydas) that nest on Ascension Island, a tiny land mass located approximately 2000 km from the turtles' foraging grounds along the coast of Brazil. Sensory cues that turtles are known to de...

Groundwater models are being constructed to evaluate the impact of increased development on two adjacent sandy barrier islands on the northern Gulf coast of Florida, USA. To characterize the hydrostratigraphy and seasonal variability we are conducting resistivity and electromagnetic profiles across the freshwater lens and seepage meter and well sampling of freshwater fluxes and heads. The islan...

The introduction of species into new ecosystems, especially in small and isolated regions such as islands, offers an excellent opportunity to answer questions of the evolutionary processes occurring in natural conditions on a scale that could never be achieved in laboratory conditions. In this study, we examined the Mexican red rump tarantula Brachypelma vagans Ausserer (Mygalomorphae: Therapho...

Wildlife conservation in Turkey does not get a high priority. Yet the country lies in a key location for birds migrating from Asia and Africa to Europe. Wildlife reserves exist but often have worryingly little support. So the development of Lake Kuyucuk in the Kars province of eastern Turkey as a wildlife reserve for thousands of birds of more than two hundred species, while also supporting loc...

A clinician's chance encounter on the subway, after a long day seeing patients, prompts reflections on the nature of our interactions with our patients and with others we come across in our lives. Random yet precise, these interactions create a string of opportunities to witness other people's lives as well as our own. Sitting next to a young girl and her mother, the author daydreams about the ...

A combined analytical and computational model is developed to study the mechanics of strained epitaxial island growth in typical semiconductor systems. Under certain growth conditions in systems with a film/substrate lattice mismatch, deposited material is known to aggregate into islandlike shapes with geometries having arc shaped cross-sections. A two-dimensional model assuming linear elastic ...

To investigate the covariation of adult body condition and nestling growth, we weighed adult Brünnich’s Guillemots Uria lomvia rearing chicks at Coats Island, Nunavut, Canada, each year between 1988 and 2002. We estimated chick mass at 14 days for a sample of chicks reared in the same years. Adult mass and chick mass at 14 days were highly correlated, suggesting that, as feeding conditions dete...

In this paper, the effect of urban heat island is analyzed using the Landsat TM data and ASTER data in 2005 as a case study in Hong Kong. Two algorithms were applied to retrieve the land surface temperature (LST) distribution from the Landsat TM and ASTER data. The spatial pattern of LST in the study area is retrieved to characterize their local effects on urban heat island. In addition, the co...

We describe the complete sequence of the 15.9-kb staphylococcal pathogenicity island 3 encoding staphylococcal enterotoxin serotypes B, K, and Q. The island, which meets the generally accepted definition of pathogenicity islands, contains 24 open reading frames potentially encoding proteins of more than 50 amino acids, including an apparently functional integrase. The element is bordered by two...

Competence-based theories of island effects play a central role in generative grammar, yet the graded nature of many syntactic islands has never been properly accounted for. Categorical syntactic accounts of island effects have persisted in spite of a wealth of data suggesting that island effects are not categorical in nature and that non-structural manipulations that leave island structures in...