The reproductive division of labour between queen and worker castes in social insects is a defining characteristic of eusociality and a classic example of phenotypic plasticity. Whether social insect larvae develop into queens or workers has long been thought to be determined by environmental cues, i.e. larvae are developmentally totipotent. Contrary to this paradigm, several recent studies hav...

URL to Code Chinook http://www.bcgsc.bc.ca/chinook/ myGRID http://www.mygrid.org.uk/ AceDB Query Language http://www.acedb.org/Cornell/ aboutacedbquery.html AQL Acedb Query Language http://www.acedb.org/ Software/whelp/AQL/ Lorel Lore Query Language http://infolab.stanford. edu/lore/ BioVelo Query Language http://www.biocyc.org/ bioveloLanguage.html BioCyc Pathway Tools http://bioinformatics.ai...

Collective behaviors in social insect societies often emerge from simple local rules. However, only little is known about how these behaviors are dynamically regulated in response to environmental changes. Here, we use a compartmental modeling approach to identify factors that allow social insects to regulate collective foraging activity in response to their environment. We propose a set of dif...

In Pogonomyrmex californicus harvester ants, an age-associated division of labor occurs in the worker caste, in which young workers perform in-nest tasks and older workers forage for food. Here, we tested whether this behavioral division is age based or age flexible, and whether it coincides with differential expression of systemic hormones with known roles in behavioral regulation. Whole-body ...

Polyphenism is the phenomenon in which alternative phenotypes are produced by a single genotype in response to environmental cues. An extreme case is found in social insects, in which reproductive queens and sterile workers that greatly differ in morphology and behavior can arise from a single genotype. Experimental evidence for maternal effects on caste determination, the differential larval d...

The harvester has been widely used in forestry operations. However the existence of obstacles in forests, such as stones, animals, human and clustered trees, may leads to safety accident and decreases the operating efficiency of the harvester. Therefore it becomes vital to show the obstacles accurately to provide guidance for the harvester. In this paper, an improved image fusion algorithm base...

A new electromagnetic energy harvester for harnessing energy from vibration induced by Kármán vortex street is proposed. It converts flow energy into electrical energy by fluid flow, vortex shedding from a bluff body and electromagnetic induction. An analytical design method for the energy harvester is developed. A prototype of the energy harvester is fabricated and tested. The prototype has a ...

Wireless sensor networks (WSN) have limited lifetime due to on board battery. The lifetime can be improved by energy harvesting solutions. In this paper the solar energy harvester requirements for TelosB mote has been analyzed and calculated. Photovoltaic (PV) panel and battery sizing requirements are calculated by assuming that the mote follows SMAC and TDMA-MAC schedule for image communicatio...

Working on new equipments to increase agricultural productivity and safety, reducing human action hardness , Cemagref and Lasmea have developed an help guidance system for agricultural vehicles. The aim of this system is to help the operator to guide the machine in order to give more attention to the order task. To reach this goal, we use a visual perception of the environment because this sens...