The vocal organ, or syrinx, of oscine birds has two parts, each of which has generally been presumed to operate independently of the other. A significant counter-example is now demonstrated in the production of a common vocalization by the black-capped chickadee (Parus atricapillus), in which the two acoustic sources interact in a nonlinear fashion. This bird produces a sound with multiple freq...

A screening system including a new real-time PCR assay for the monitoring of influenza A virus in wild birds was developed. The real-time PCR assay uses SYBR green chemistry and the primers are targeting the matrix gene of influenza A virus. The performance of the assay was compared with two other assays, one assay also using SYBR green chemistry and one assay using TaqMan chemistry, i.e. a spe...

Increased shipping in British Columbia (BC) waters poses risks for marine birds from marine oil spills. Ancient Murrelets (Synthliboramphus antiquus), small marine diving birds of which half of the world's population breeds in BC, are especially susceptible to oiling immediately after departing from their breeding colonies, as their offspring are flightless, constraining their parents to remain...

This paper shows a generic method of constructing CCAsecure public key encryption schemes with leakage resilience on the secret key. It is based on a new kind of universal2 hash proof system which accepts an auxiliary parameter. Specifically, two schemes are presented, basing on the DCR assumption and DLIN assumption respectively.

Over the past year, much progress has been achieved in the study of both the peripheral and the central auditory systems of birds. Significant advances have been made in the study of hair cells, including elucidation of the mechanisms of selectivity for sound frequency, functional differentiation, efferent innervation, and regeneration. Most of the studies of central auditory neurones have conc...

As a special class of linear codes, minimal linear codes have important applications in secret sharing and secure two-party computation. Constructing minimal linear codes with new and desirable parameters has been an interesting research topic in coding theory and cryptography. Ashikhmin and Barg showed that wmin/wmax > (q− 1)/q is a sufficient condition for a linear code over the finite field ...