We show that the climate phenomena of El Niño and La Niña arise naturally as states of macrovariables when our recent causal feature learning framework (Chalupka et al., 2015, 2016) is applied to micro-level measures of zonal wind (ZW) and sea surface temperatures (SST) taken over the equatorial band of the Pacific Ocean. The method identifies these unusual climate states on the basis of the re...

Birds have a ZZ/ZW sex chromosome system, but the mechanism of sex determination remains unknown. The heterogametic sex is female (ZW) and one hypothesis holds that the W chromosome carries a dominant-acting ovary-determining gene. The strongest candidate ovary-determinant on the W chromosome is HINTW, which encodes an aberrant nucleotide hydrolase enzyme. HINTW is conserved amongst all carinat...

Hubble Space Telescope (HST) colour magnitude diagrams in B, V and R along with long-slit Multiple Mirror Telescope (MMT) spectrophotometric data are used to investigate the evolutionary status of the nearby blue compact dwarf (BCD) galaxy I Zw 18. We find that the distance to I Zw 18 should be as high as 20 Mpc, twice the previously accepted distance, to be consistent with existing observation...

Full-quantum mechanical fragment molecular orbital-based molecular dynamics (FMO-MD) simulations were applied to the hydration reaction of formaldehyde in water solution under neutral conditions. Two mechanisms, a concerted and a stepwise one, were considered with respect to the nucleophilic addition and the proton transfer. Preliminary molecular orbital calculations by means of polarized conti...

In mice and humans, the androgen receptor (AR) gene, located on the X chromosome, is not known to be involved in sex determination. In the Japanese frog Rana rugosa the AR is located on the sex chromosomes (X, Y, Z and W). Phylogenetic analysis shows that the AR on the X chromosome (X-AR) of the Korean R. rugosa is basal and segregates into two clusters: one containing W-AR of Japanese R. rugos...

In female heterogamous (ZW) species, sex-linked genes coding for maternal products that are packaged into the egg open a unique arena for genetic conflict that does not occur in male heterogamous (XY) species. Z-linked maternal-effect alleles that help sons and harm daughters are expected to go to fixation, as are W-linked alleles that help daughters and harm sons. This conflict differs from kn...

Two blue compact dwarf galaxies Mkn 104 and I Zw 97 are studied photometrically and spectroscopically. Mkn 104 is found to contain three distinct bright star forming regions, whereas I Zw 97 is found to contain three bright and two faint star forming regions. Medium resolution spectra of three bright H ii regions in the two galaxies were obtained. Estimation of oxygen abundance in these regions...

We present the analysis of FUSE observations of the metal-deficient dwarf galaxy I Zw 18. We measured

Genetic mapping of quantitative trait loci (QTLs) is performed typically by using a parametric approach, based on the assumption that the phenotype follows a normal distribution. Many traits of interest, however, are not normally distributed. In this paper, we present a nonparametric approach to QTL mapping applicable to any phenotypic distribution. The method is based on a statistic ZW, which ...