Among the services offered by the AliEn (ALICE Environment http://alien.cern.ch) Grid framework there is a virtual file catalogue to allow transparent access to distributed data-sets using various file transfer protocols. alienfs (AliEn File System) integrates the AliEn file catalogue as a new file system type into the Linux kernel using LUFS, a hybrid user space file system framework (Open Sou...

BACKGROUND The alien hand syndrome is a striking phenomenon characterized by purposeful and autonomous movements that are not voluntarily initiated. This study aimed to examine neural correlates of this rare neurological disorder in a patient with corticobasal degeneration and alien hand syndrome of the left hand. METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS We employed functional magnetic resonance imagin...

Spatially explicit assessments of alien species environmental and socio-economic impacts, and subsequent management interventions for their mitigation, require large scale, high-resolution data on species presence distribution. However, these data are often unavailable. This paper presents a method that relies on Random Forest (RF) models to distribute alien species presence counts at a finer r...

Alien predators are widely considered to be more harmful to prey populations than native predators. To evaluate this expectation, we conducted a meta-analysis of the responses of vertebrate prey in 45 replicated and 35 unreplicated field experiments in which the population densities of mammalian and avian predators had been manipulated. Our results showed that predator origin (native versus ali...

BACKGROUND Alien limb phenomenon occurs in 50-60% of patients with corticobasal syndrome (CBS) and usually presents with an "alien hand" phenomenon. The "alien foot" presentation is rarer and may be misdiagnosed, as foot involvement can lead to erroneous localization of the clinical problem to the knee, hip, or back. Subsequently misdiagnoses such as myelopathy, radiculopathy, functional disord...

Data of alien species presences are generally more readily available in protected than non-protected areas due to higher sampling efforts inside protected areas. Are the results and conclusions based on analyses of data collected in protected areas representative of wider non-protected regions? We address this question by analysing some recently published data of alien plants in Greece. Mixed e...

Land managers are concerned about the negative effects of alien annual plants on native plants, threatened and endangered species such as the desert tortoise (Gopherus agassizii), and ecosystem integrity in the Mojave Desert. Management of alien plants is hampered by a lack of information regarding the dominance and environmental correlates of these species. The results of this study indicate t...

The assembly of nucleosomes into chromatin is essential for the compaction of DNA and inactivation of the DNA template to modulate and repress gene expression. The nucleosome assembly protein 1, NAP1, assembles nucleosomes independent of DNA synthesis and was shown to enhance coactivator-mediated gene expression, suggesting a role for NAP1 in transcriptional regulation. Here, we show that Alien...

The structure of plant-pollinator networks has been claimed to be resilient to changes in species composition due to the weak degree of dependence among mutualistic partners. However, detailed empirical investigations of the consequences of introducing an alien plant species into mutualistic networks are lacking. We present the first cross-European analysis by using a standardized protocol to a...