Bears are iconic mammals with a complex evolutionary history. Natural bear hybrids and studies of few nuclear genes indicate that gene flow among bears may be more common than expected and not limited to polar and brown bears. Here we present a genome analysis of the bear family with representatives of all living species. Phylogenomic analyses of 869 mega base pairs divided into 18,621 genome f...

The goals of this project are to develop rehabilitation strategies and enhance seismic design guidelines for key equipments in power substations, which are one of the most critical facilities in a power system. Furthermore, it will provide the knowledge base to be integrated into the overall loss estimation model for the entire power network. To achieve these goals, key substation equipments ar...

A base-isolation system was developed for earthquake protection of low-rise structures. The system incorporates spherical supports for the base, a specially designed spring-cam system to keep the base supported under normal conditions, and moves for the duration of the earthquake under the constraint of a spring with optimized stiffness characteristics. The dynamic behaviour of a three-story co...

The dynamic response of a series of base-isolated systems subjected to ground motions that were recorded in firm soils located inshore of the Mexican Pacific was estimated in order to evaluate the influence of the structural properties of these systems in their floor acceleration demands. While the super-structures were assumed to remain elastic, the energy dissipation capacity of the base-isol...

The divergent genital morphology observed among closely related animal species has long been posited as a mechanism of reproductive isolation. Despite the intuitive appeal that rapidly evolving genitalia might cause speciation, evidence for its importance-or even its potential-in reproductive isolation is mixed. Most tests of genital structural isolation between species often fail to find convi...

Vulnerability in base isolation system of civil structures originated from passive nature of the rubber material raises the urgency of developing smart base isolation system with adaptive and controllable properties, i.e. variable stiffness and damping. To address this issue, this paper presents comprehensive investigations on a novel adaptive base isolator, including design, experimental testi...

A prototype prediction based intelligent diagnostic system that is capable of integrating qualitative and quantitative process models and operation experience in the form of HAZOP result tables is proposed in this paper. The knowledge base of the system is organized in a hierarchical way following the hierarchy levels of the multi-scale model of the process system. This supports the focusing of...

We describe an importance-sampling method for approximating likelihoods of population parameters based on multiple summary statistics. In this first application, we address the demographic history of closely related members of the Drosophila pseudoobscura group. We base the maximum-likelihood estimation of the time since speciation and the effective population sizes of the extant and ancestral ...

In contrast to the large amount of ecological information supporting the role of natural selection as a main cause of population divergence and speciation, an understanding of the genomic basis underlying those processes is in its infancy. In this paper, we review the main findings of a long-term research programme that we have been conducting on the ecological genomics of sympatric forms of wh...