Several squirrel species excise the embryo of acorns of most white oak species to arrest germination for long-term storage. However, it is not clear how these acorns counter embryo excision and survive in the arms race of coevolution. In this study, we simulated the embryo excision behavior of squirrels by removing 4 mm of cotyledon from the apical end of white oak acorns differing in embryo de...

omplex nervous system patterning—usually assumed to have coevolved with advanced, centralized nervous systems— may have arisen before nerves consolidated into a central nerve chord, according to Christopher Lowe, John Gerhart (University of California, Berkeley, CA), Marc Kirschner (Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA), and colleagues. Their idea runs counter to the prevailing theory of dorsoven...

Conservation Status—The western gray squirrel is classified as an ISSSSP Sensitive Species in Washington, and is an Oregon Conservation Strategy (OCS) Species as well as a game animal (ODFW 2006), however the species has no federal special status. In Washington, the western gray squirrel is designated as a state threatened species (WDFW 2009). Factors limiting western gray squirrel populations ...

Within the European project "New Safe and Cost Effective Techniques Against Asbestos Risks" different methods for decontamination of asbestos in asbestos containing wastes, abbreviated as ACW from building industry were investigated. A mobile asbestos decontamination unit was developed, aiming at the complete disintegration of asbestos fibres on-site. The process is based on a chemo-thermal tre...

At the beginning of Die Grundlagen der Arithmetik (§2) [1884], Frege observes that “it is in the nature of mathematics to prefer proof, where proof is possible”. This, of course, is true, but thinkers differ on why it is that mathematicians prefer proof. And what of propositions for which no proof is possible? What of axioms? This talk explores various notions of self-evidence, and the role the...

The objective of the character recognition effort for the Archimedes Palimpsest is to provide a tool that allows scholars of ancient Greek mathematics to retrieve as much information as possible from the remaining degraded text. With this in mind, the current pattern recognition system does not output a single classification decision, as in typical target detection problems, but has been design...

We give a multivariate generalization of Borell’s noise stability theorem for Gaussian vectors. As a consequence we recover two inequalities, also due to Borell, for exit times of the Ornstein-Uhlenbeck process.

1. INTRODUCTION. A spectacular landmark in the history of mathematics was the discovery by Archimedes (287-212 B.C.) that the volume of a solid sphere is two-thirds the volume of the smallest cylinder that surrounds it, and that the surface area of the sphere is also two-thirds the total surface area of the same cylinder. Archime-des was so excited by this discovery that he wanted a sphere and ...

We give an explicit bound for the L1-distance between two additive processes of local characteristics (fj(·), σ(·), νj), j = 1, 2. The cases σ = 0 and σ(·) > 0 are both treated. We allow ν1 and ν2 to be time-homogeneous Lévy measures, possibly with infinite variation. Some examples of possible applications are discussed.

Archimedes (287-212) has shown that when you put a sphere in a cylinder in the tightest manner, the lateral area of the cylinder is the area of the sphere itself. This is not an easy result, and Archimedes was so proud of it that he asked that the corresponding picture should be engraved on his tomb in Agrigente in Sicily : 150 years after his murder during the siege of Syracuse by an ignorant ...