Urbanisation and agriculture cause declines for many wildlife, but some species benefit from novel resources, especially food, provided in human-dominated habitats. Resulting shifts in wildlife ecology can alter infectious disease dynamics and create opportunities for cross-species transmission, yet predicting host-pathogen responses to resource provisioning is challenging. Factors enhancing tr...

The idea of genetic assimilation, that environmentally induced phenotypes may become genetically fixed and no longer require the original environmental stimulus, has had varied success through time in evolutionary biology research. Proposed by Waddington in the 1940s, it became an area of active empirical research mostly thanks to the efforts of its inventor and his collaborators. It was then a...

We propose UV observations using the ACS/SBC of Titan's extended escaping atmosphere for the Jan/Feb 2009 period of transits of Titan across Saturn. A combination of absorption of Saturn's reflected solar UV emission in transit, and extended emissions primarily from H atoms away from transit, will yield new information about the structure of Titan's extended upper atmosphere. These observations...

This survey organizes and summarizes existing theoretical work on private sector training. The theoretical models focus on investment efficiency, finance and turnover. Recent developments in the on-the-job training literature are characterized by strategic interaction between employers and employees and emphasize market imperfections.

The goal of this study was to investigate the factors that influence how consumers continue to use, and how frequently they use, internet banking in Australia. Patterns of continued use and frequency of use of internet banking have been neglected as most of the existing studies focus on either consumer adoption or acceptance of internet banking. However, in comparison to new customer acquisitio...

Nanostructures are commonly used for developing superhydrophobic surfaces. However, available wetting theoretical models ignore the effect of vacuum photon-mode alteration on van der Waals forces and thus on hydrophobicity. Using first-principles calculations, we show that superhydrophibicity of nanostructured surfaces is dramatically enhanced by vacuum photon-mode tuning. As a case study, wett...

In this paper, we review the principal theoretical models through which the dielectric function of metals can be described. Starting from the Drude assumptions for intraband transitions, we show how this model can be improved by including interband absorption and temperature effect in the damping coefficients. Electronic scattering processes are described and included in the dielectric function...

The production and maintenance of genetic and phenotypic diversity under temporally fluctuating selection and the signatures of environmental changes in the patterns of this variation have been important areas of focus in population genetics. On one hand, periods of constant selection pull the genetic makeup of populations toward local fitness optima. On the other, to cope with changes in the s...

BACKGROUND Non-equilibrium charge transport in superconductors has been investigated intensely in the 1970s and 1980s, mostly in the vicinity of the critical temperature. Much less attention has been paid to low temperatures and the role of the quasiparticle spin. RESULTS We report here on nonlocal transport in superconductor hybrid structures at very low temperatures. By comparing the nonloc...

We introduce a simple spherical model whose structural properties are similar to the ones generated by models with directional interactions, by employing a binary mixture of large and small hard spheres, with a square-well attraction acting only between particles of different sizes. The small particles provide the bonds between the large ones. With a proper choice of the interaction parameters,...