BACKGROUND AND AIMS Considerable variation in seed size commonly exists within plants, and is believed to be favoured under natural selection. This study aims to examine the extent to which seed size distribution depends on the presence of competing neighbour plants. METHODS Phaseolus vulgaris plants rooting with or without a conspecific neighbour were grown in soil with high or low nutrient ...

Good self-control has been linked to adaptive outcomes such as better health, cohesive personal relationships, success in the workplace and at school, and less susceptibility to crime and addictions. In contrast, self-control failure is linked to maladaptive outcomes. Understanding the mechanisms by which self-control predicts behavior may assist in promoting better regulation and outcomes. A p...

environmental issues have attracted many concerns in recent years. life cycle assessment (lca) is a method that evaluates all environmental effects of a product during its life cycle. the objective of this study was to introduce lca [to persian researchers] and to use it in assessment of environmental impact of wheat production in gorgan, ne iran compared to european counties. first, data were ...

Granivorous rodent populations in deserts are primarily regulated through precipitation-driven resource pulses rather than pulses associated with mast-seeding, a pattern more common in mesic habitats. We studied heteromyid responses to mast-seeding in the desert shrub blackbrush (Coleogyne ramosissima), a regionally dominant species in the Mojave-Great Basin Desert transition zone. In a 5-year ...

Contemporary debates concerning the attentional blink (AB) question whether resource depletion causes this robust attentional deficit. To investigate this uncertainty, we employed rapid serial visual presentation paradigms that presented stimuli at 30-120msec/item. In addition to the two targets of interest, a third target was positioned immediately before the second target on ’three-target’ tr...

In Satake's generalized resource budget model of ecology, which was modified from Isagi's resource budget model, Satake and Iwasa illustrated, by computing the positive Lyapunov exponent, that if the depletion coefficient is greater than one, then the system is chaotic. However, a positive Lyapunov exponent implies only sensitivity in Devaney's chaos. Therefore, this work presents mathematical ...

Recent work on bilingual Word Sense Disambiguation (WSD) has shown that a resource deprived language (L1) can benefit from the annotation work done in a resource rich language (L2) via parameter projection. However, this method assumes the presence of sufficient annotated data in one resource rich language which may not always be possible. Instead, we focus on the situation where there are two ...

Mast-seeding species exhibit not only a large inter-annual variability in seed production but also considerable variability among individuals within the same year. However, very little is known about the causes and consequences for population dynamics of this potentially large between-individual variability. Here, we quantified seed production over ten consecutive years in two Mediterranean oak...