Spider dung beetles: coordinated cooperative transport without a predefined destination.

Cooperative transport allows for the transportation of items too large for the capacity of a single individual. Beyond humans, it is regularly employed by ants and social spiders where two or more individuals, with more or less coordinated movements, transport food to a known destination. In contrast to this, pairs of male and female dung beetles successfully transport brood balls to a location unknown to either party at the start of their common journey.

Development of broad modulus profile upon polymer-polymer interface formation between immiscible glassy-rubbery domains.

Interfaces of glassy materials such as thin films, blends, and composites create strong unidirectional gradients to the local heterogeneous dynamics that can be used to elucidate the length scales and mechanisms associated with the dynamic heterogeneity of glasses. We focus on bilayer films of two different polymers with very different glass transition temperatures ([Formula: see text]) where previous work has demonstrated a long-range (∼200 nm) profile in local [Formula: see text] is established between immiscible glassy and rubbery polymer domains when the polymer-polymer interface is formed to equilibrium. Here, we demonstrate that an equally long-ranged gradient in local modulus [Formula: see text] is established when the polymer-polymer interface ([Formula: see text]5 nm) is formed between domains of glassy polystyrene (PS) and rubbery poly(butadiene) (PB), consistent with previous reports of a broad [Formula: see text] profile in this system.

An Intra-Tissue Radiometry Microprobe for Measuring Radiance In Situ in Living Tissue.

Organisms appear opaque largely because their outer tissue layers are strongly scattering to incident light; strongly absorbing pigments, such as blood, typically have narrow absorbances, such that the mean free path of light outside the absorbance peaks can be quite long. As people cannot see through tissue, they generally imagine that tissues like the brain, fat, and bone contain little or no light. However, photoresponsive opsin proteins are expressed within many of these tissues, and their functions are poorly understood.

Increasing diabetes testing adherence with incentives in rural Northwestern Ontario.

Introduction: The health outcomes of rural Canadians have been described as poor and can in some part be related to diabetes mellitus. Despite the high mortality and morbidity rates associated with the disease, compliance with management remains low. Research has shown that a small financial incentive used to modify patient behaviour, can improve outcomes in cardiac disease and exercise adherence.

The balbyter ant combines several navigational strategies to support homing when foraging in the close vicinity of its nest.

Many insects rely on path integration to define direct routes back to their nests. When shuttling hundreds of meters back and forth between a profitable foraging site and a nest, navigational errors accumulate unavoidably in this compass- and odometer-based system. In familiar terrain, terrestrial landmarks can be used to compensate for these errors and safely guide the insect back to its nest with pin-point precision.