Ecdysone is the major steroid hormone in insects and plays essential roles in coordinating developmental transitions such as larval molting and metamorphosis through its active metabolite 20-hydroxyecdysone (20E). Although ecdysone is present throughout life in both males and females, its functions in adult physiology remain largely unknown. In this study we demonstrate that ecdysone-mediated s...

Very few studies have described brain scaling in vertebrates throughout ontogeny and none in lampreys, one of the two surviving groups of the early agnathan (jawless) stage in vertebrate evolution. The life cycle of anadromous parasitic lampreys comprises two divergent trophic phases, firstly filter-feeding as larvae in freshwater and secondly parasitism as adults in the sea, with the transitio...

Insect-parasitic nematodes, which obtain nutrients from a living host, arose independently in more than 20 lineages and in different geological periods since Silurian times. Except for Mermithidae, all these are Secernentea, which in various lineages exhibit different degrees between the first steps towards parasitism and obligate parasitism. Only in some tylenchids the transition passed throug...

Functional analysis of essential genes in the malarial parasite, Plasmodium, is hindered by lack of efficient strategies for conditional protein regulation. We report the development of a rapid, specific, and inducible chemical-genetic tool in the rodent malaria parasite, P. berghei, in which endogenous proteins engineered to contain the auxin-inducible degron (AID) are selectively degraded upo...

an artificial neural network (ann) model is developed for the analysis, simulation, and prediction of the austenite reversion in the thermo-mechanical treatment of 304l austenitic stainless steel. the results of the ann model are in good agreement with the experimental data. the model is used to predict an appropriate annealing condition for austenite reversion through the martensite to austeni...

We ask whether lexical hesitations in spontaneous speech tend to precede words that are difficult to predict. We define predictability in terms of both transition probability and entropy, in the context of an N-gram language model. Results show that transition probability is significantly lower at hesitation transitions, and that this is attributable to both the following word and the word hist...

Delayed life history effects (DLHEs) occur when fitness in one life stage affects fitness in subsequent life stages. Given their biphasic life cycle, pond-breeding amphibians provide a natural system for studying DLHEs, although these effects are not restricted to species with biphasic life histories. In this study, we used multiple mark-recapture techniques enabled by a large trapping array to...