In a recent article Matyjasiak et al[ "0888# tested the hypothesis that the cost of a long forked tail ornament can be due to impaired foraging[ The authors lengthened\ experimentally\ the outermost tail feathers of female sand martins "Riparia riparia# and checked the ~ight cost of the manipulation in terms of foraging cost\ i[e[ feeding rates and prey items size[ They found that tail!elongate...

Recent studies have suggested that the proximal part of the swallow (Hirundo rustica) tail streamer appears to aid turning flight, as expected if streamers evolved initially purely through natural selection for enhanced manoeuvrability. However, the evolution of slender aerodynamically advantageous streamers is also predicted by an alternative hypothesis, which suggests that such a trait could ...

in animals are potential anti-predator benefits, including the many-eyes effect, predator confusion, the dilution of individual risk of being caught when part of a large group, and the selfish herd effect (Krause & Ruxton 2002). The many-eyes effect postulates that an increased number of potential prey individuals scanning for predators are more effective at detecting their approach, and this e...

Life history theory predicts that when resources are limited growing organisms are likely to trade an immune response for competing demands of growth. To test this we examined the effect of energy intake on body mass increments and an immune response in hand-reared sand martin (Riparia riparia) nestlings. We subjected the nestlings to three different feeding regimes, mimicking the range of food...

Tolerance graphs have been extensively studied since their introduction, due to their interesting structure and their numerous applications, as they generalize both interval and permutation graphs in a natural way. It has been conjectured by Golumbic, Monma, and Trotter in 1984 that the intersection of tolerance and cocomparability graphs coincides with bounded tolerance graphs. Since cocompara...

gibbs and martin build on durkheim’s view that the degree of social integration is inversely related to the rate of suicide. according to gibbs and martin, which is expressed in terms of five axioms, the rate of suicide is a function of the degree of status integration in a society. this theory has been extensively subjected to experimental studies, which have supported its axioms. most of thes...

Tunisia’s unemployment rate has been among the highest in the world for almost two decades. This article claims that such a high rate reflects measurement problems rather than labor market inefficiency. After discussing the reasons why unemployment rates may not be comparable across countries and reviewing the tools that are available to analyze unemployment in a specific country, the article p...

The focus of my research is extremal graph theory and random combinatorial structures. I have also worked in a variety of other areas, including intersecting hypergraphs, the theory of positional games and Ramsey theory. Combinatorics, and particularly graph theory, has a wide variety of applications. My own research in the edit distance of graphs has applications in biology and computer scienc...

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Bill Martin studied biology at Texas A&M and the University of Hannover. He did his PhD at the Max-Planck Institute for Breeding Research in Cologne under the generous supervision of Heinz Saedler, who discovered the transposons known as IS elements. After fi nishing his PhD in 1988, he did his postdoctoral work on chloroplastcytosol isoenzymes, endosymbiosis, and gene transfer at the Universit...