Unclear relationships between mean survival rate and its environmental variance in vertebrates.

Current environmental changes may increase temporal variability of life history traits of species thus affecting their long-term population growth rate and extinction risk. If there is a general relationship between environmental variances (EVs) and mean annual survival rates of species, that relationship could be used as a guideline for analyses of population growth and extinction risk for populations, where data on EVs are missing. For this purpose, we present a comprehensive compilation of 252 EV estimates from 89 species belonging to five vertebrate taxa (birds, mammals, reptiles, amphibians and fish) covering mean annual survival rates from 0.

Multiparametric Profiling of Engineered Nanomaterials: Unmasking the Surface Coating Effect.

Despite considerable efforts, the properties that drive the cytotoxicity of engineered nanomaterials (ENMs) remain poorly understood. Here, the authors inverstigate a panel of 31 ENMs with different core chemistries and a variety of surface modifications using conventional in vitro assays coupled with omics-based approaches. Cytotoxicity screening and multiplex-based cytokine profiling reveals a good concordance between primary human monocyte-derived macrophages and the human monocyte-like cell line THP-1.

Variability of slot size in orthodontic brackets.

Objective: The accuracy of the information incorporated into brackets is a determining factor for the efficacy of torque applied to teeth. The aim of this study was to compare the dimensions of a bracket's slots with the nominal values announced by the manufacturer.

Materials And Methods: A total of 730 maxillary right central brackets manufactured by seven companies (Dentsply Gac, American Orthodontics, Rocky Mountain Orthodontics, GC Orthodontics, 3M Unitek, and Dentaurum) were studied.

Intraspecific Variation in Wood Anatomical, Hydraulic, and Foliar Traits in Ten European Beech Provenances Differing in Growth Yield.

In angiosperms, many studies have described the inter-specific variability of hydraulic-related traits and little is known at the intra-specific level. This information is however mandatory to assess the adaptive capacities of tree populations in the context of increasing drought frequency and severity. Ten 20-year old European beech (Fagus sylvatica L.

Impacts of local adaptation of forest trees on associations with herbivorous insects: implications for adaptive forest management.

Disruption of species interactions is a key issue in climate change biology. Interactions involving forest trees may be particularly vulnerable due to evolutionary rate limitations imposed by long generation times. One mitigation strategy for such impacts is Climate matching - the augmentation of local native tree populations by input from nonlocal populations currently experiencing predicted future climates.

Assessing age-related gray matter decline with voxel-based morphometry depends significantly on segmentation and normalization procedures.

Healthy ageing coincides with a progressive decline of brain gray matter (GM) ultimately affecting the entire brain. For a long time, manual delineation-based volumetry within predefined regions of interest (ROI) has been the gold standard for assessing such degeneration. Voxel-Based Morphometry (VBM) offers an automated alternative approach that, however, relies critically on the segmentation and spatial normalization of a large collection of images from different subjects.

Real-time biomimetic Central Pattern Generators in an FPGA for hybrid experiments.

This investigation of the leech heartbeat neural network system led to the development of a low resources, real-time, biomimetic digital hardware for use in hybrid experiments. The leech heartbeat neural network is one of the simplest central pattern generators (CPG). In biology, CPG provide the rhythmic bursts of spikes that form the basis for all muscle contraction orders (heartbeat) and locomotion (walking, running, etc.

Wavelet transform for real-time detection of action potentials in neural signals.

We present a study on wavelet detection methods of neuronal action potentials (APs). Our final goal is to implement the selected algorithms on custom integrated electronics for on-line processing of neural signals; therefore we take real-time computing as a hard specification and silicon area as a price to pay. Using simulated neural signals including APs, we characterize an efficient wavelet method for AP extraction by evaluating its detection rate and its implementation cost.