Bayesian networks (Pearl 1988), which provide a compact graphical way to express complex probabilistic relationships among several random variables, are rapidly becoming the tool of choice for dealing with uncertainty in knowledge based systems. Amongst the many advantages offered by Bayesian networks over other representations such as decision trees and neural networks are the ease of comprehe...

The metabolic cost of flight increases with mass, so animals that fly tend to exhibit morphological traits that reduce body weight. However, all flying animals must sometimes fly while carrying loads. Load carrying is especially relevant for bats, which experience nightly and seasonal fluctuations in body mass of 40% or more. In this study, we examined how the climbing flight performance of fru...

The new species Mesosmittia museophila from the Neotropics is described and illustrated based on male imagines. A cladistic analysis was conducted in order to assess its possible relationships with the remaining species in the genus, and it was found that M. museophila is the sister group of M. mina Sæther and these two species are closely related to M. prolixa Sæther. This analysis suggests th...

∗This work has been supported in part by DFG Sonderforschungsbereich Transregio 9, Computergestützte Theoretische Teilchenphysik, by Studienstiftung des Deutschen Volkes, by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) grants P20347N18, P22748-N18 and SFB F50 (F5009-N15), by the EU Network LHCPHENOnet PITN-GA-2010-264564, by the Reserach Center ‘Elementary Forces and Mathematical Foundations (EMG) of J. Gut...

We sequenced the metagenome of a granular sludge in a nitritation/anammox bioreactor used for the treatment of ammonium-rich wastewater. Proteobacteria, Planctomycetes, Bacteroidetes, Chloroflexi, Ignavibacteriae, and Acidobacteria were the predominant phyla in the studied bioreactor. Binning of contigs yielded a near-complete genome of the dominant anammox bacterium assigned to the candidate g...

Recent physiological investigations1-3, 5 have suggested that in humans there is greater sensitivity and discrimination for horizontally and vertically oriented edges and gratings than for diagonal ones. Several investigations have looked for a neuro-physiological counterpart of this effect in striate cortex of the cat and monkey. Two hypotheses have been proposed: (1) Neurons with horizontal a...

Six species of adult oribatid mites (Galumna racilis, Kilimabates pilosus, Kilimabates sp., Scheloribates fusifer, Muliercula ngoyensis and Zygoribatula undulata) and two immature stages belonging to the superfamilies Galumnoidea and Ceratozetoidea were isolated from a lawn (mixed Pennisetum and Cynodon spp.) at Onderstepoort Veterinary Institute, South Africa. The mites were subsequently used ...