3D genital shape complexity in female marine mammals.

Comparisons of 3D shapes have recently been applied to diverse anatomical structures using landmarking techniques. However, discerning evolutionary patterns can be challenging for structures lacking homologous landmarks. We used alpha shape analyses to quantify vaginal shape complexity in 40 marine mammal specimens including cetaceans, pinnipeds, and sirenians.

Changes in Circulation and Particle Scavenging in the Amerasian Basin of the Arctic Ocean over the Last Three Decades Inferred from the Water Column Distribution of Geochemical Tracers.

Since the 1980-1990s, international research efforts have augmented our knowledge of the physical and chemical properties of the Arctic Ocean water masses, and recent studies have documented changes. Understanding the processes responsible for these changes is necessary to be able to forecast the local and global consequences of these property evolutions on climate. The present work investigates the distributions of geochemical tracers of particle fluxes and circulation in the Amerasian Basin and their temporal evolution over the last three decades (from stations visited between 1983 and 2015).

The database of the PREDICTS (Projecting Responses of Ecological Diversity In Changing Terrestrial Systems) project.

The PREDICTS project-Projecting Responses of Ecological Diversity In Changing Terrestrial Systems (www.predicts.org.

Dynamic egg color mimicry.

Evolutionary hypotheses regarding the function of eggshell phenotypes, from solar protection through mimicry, have implicitly assumed that eggshell appearance remains static throughout the laying and incubation periods. However, recent research demonstrates that egg coloration changes over relatively short, biologically relevant timescales. Here, we provide the first evidence that such changes impact brood parasite-host eggshell color mimicry during the incubation stage.

Imitated Prosodic Fluency Predicts Reading Comprehension Ability in Good and Poor High School Readers.

Researchers have established a relationship between beginning readers' silent comprehension ability and their prosodic fluency, such that readers who read aloud with appropriate prosody tend to have higher scores on silent reading comprehension assessments. The current study was designed to investigate this relationship in two groups of high school readers: Specifically Poor Comprehenders (SPCs), who have adequate word level and phonological skills but poor reading comprehension ability, and a group of age- and decoding skill-matched controls. We compared the prosodic fluency of the two groups by determining how effectively they produced prosodic cues to syntactic and semantic structure in imitations of a model speaker's production of syntactically and semantically varied sentences.

Follicular dendritic cells, conduits, lymphatic vessels, and high endothelial venules in tertiary lymphoid organs: Parallels with lymph node stroma.

In this communication, the contribution of stromal, or non-hematopoietic, cells to the structure and function of lymph nodes (LNs), as canonical secondary lymphoid organs (SLOs), is compared to that of tertiary lymphoid tissue or organs (TLOs), also known as ectopic lymphoid tissues. TLOs can arise in non-lymphoid organs during chronic inflammation, as a result of autoimmune responses, graft rejection, atherosclerosis, microbial infection, and cancer. The stromal components found in SLOs including follicular dendritic cells, fibroblast reticular cells, lymphatic vessels, and high endothelial venules and possibly conduits are present in TLOs; their molecular regulation mimics that of LNs.

Lagrangian crumpling equations.

A concise method for following the evolving geometry of a moving surface using Lagrangian coordinates is described. All computations can be done in the fixed geometry of the initial surface despite the evolving complexity of the moving surface. The method is applied to three problems in nonlinear elasticity: the bulging of a thin plate under pressure (the original motivation for Föppl-von Karman theory), the buckling of a spherical shell under pressure, and the phenomenon of capillary wrinkles induced by surface tension in a thin film.