Individual recognition is an essential component of interactions in many social systems, but insects are often thought incapable of the sophistication necessary to recognize individuals. If this were true, it would impose limits on the societies that insects could form. For example, queens and workers of the paper wasp Polistes fuscatus form a linear dominance hierarchy that determines how food...

Individual variability influences the demographic and evolutionary dynamics of spatially structured populations, and conversely ecological and evolutionary dynamics provide the context under which variations at the individual level occur. Therefore, it is essential to identify and characterize the importance of the different factors that may promote or hinder individual variability. Animal sign...

Remembering individual identities is part of our own everyday social life. Surprisingly, this ability has recently been shown in two social insects. While paper wasps recognize each other individually through their facial markings, the ant, Pachycondyla villosa, uses chemical cues. In both species, individual recognition is adaptive since it facilitates the maintenance of stable dominance hiera...

personal impression of a talker. The speech of someone familiar can have a subtle impact, and even an unfamiliar voice suggests traits, true or false, of the one who spoke. It should not be surprising that qualitative variation in speech has commonly been identified as the source of these personal impressions, and a substantial technical literature reports investigations of the acoustic correla...

While study focusing on cultural identity has been vastly reported in the literature, not much is really known about the relationship between knowledge sharing behavior and cultural identity. Against this background, this study was undertaken to examine the relationship between knowledge sharing identity and the four cultural identities, namely, horizontal individualism, vertical individualism,...

It has been hypothesized that the ribosome gains additional fidelity during protein translation by probing structural differences in tRNA species. We measure the translocation kinetics of different tRNA species through ∼3 nm diameter synthetic nanopores. Each tRNA species varies in the time scale with which it is deformed from equilibrium, as in the translocation step of protein translation. Us...

The approach of individual life histories has been facilitated by a rapid growth in the area of bioand archaeological sciences, and in human osteology. Concurrent improvements to radiocarbon dating and focus on high resolution paleoenvironmental reconstructions have moved the new research to the annual or decadal scale of analysis. Together, this new approach allows us: (1) to reconstruct long ...