Heat retention by webs of the fall webworm Hyphantria cunea (Lepidoptera: Arctiidae): infrared warming and forced convective cooling

1. Webs of the fall webworm (Lepidoptera: Hyphantria cunea Drury) were studied to determine how web temperatures respond to infrared radiation and wind. Webs were individually mounted under an infrared light source at the end of a wind tunnel.

2. During infrared heating, the front (outward-facing) surface and central interior of the web were more effective at trapping and holding heat than the back (inner) surface.

3. Thermal heterogeneity inside webs represents options to larvae, allowing the possibility of behavioral thermoregulation.

4. During windy conditions, webs slowed air movements enough to allow the web interior to retain some captured heat.     

NSort/DB:An Intranuclear Compartment Protein Database

Distinct substructures within the nucleus are associated with a wide variety of important nuclear processes.Structures such as chromatin and nuclear pores have specific roles,while others such as Cajal bodies are more functionally varied.Understanding the roles of these membraneless intra-nuclear compartments requires extensive data sets covering nuclear and compartment-associated proteins.NSort/DB is a database providing access to intra-or sub-nuclear compartment associations for the mouse nuclear proteome.Based on resources ranging from large-scale curated data sets to detailed experiments,this data set provides a high-quality set of annotations of non-exclusive association of nuclear proteins with structures such as promyelocytic leukaemia bodies and chromatin.The database is searchable by protein identifier or compartment,and has a documented web service API.The search interface,web service and data download are all freely available online at http://www.nsort.org/db/.Availability of this data set will enable systematic analyses of the protein complements of nuclear compartments,improving our understanding of the diverse functional repertoire of these structures.     

The scientific profiles of terrestrial mammals in Great Britain as measured by publication metrics

Research on mammals provides the evidence base for their conservation, management and related policy. We assess the effect of study choices on the composition of this evidence base. We derived species h‐index (SHI) for 67 breeding terrestrial mammals from 2305 publications based on field research carried out in England, Scotland and Wales. Native species had higher SHI than introduced species, but SHI was not related to the level of species conservation concern. SHI was positively related to geographical range and/or population size and to functional group: large herbivores had higher SHI, then carnivores, rodents, small herbivores, bats and insectivores.     

The Old Kinship Studies Confronts Gay Kinship: A Critique of Kath Weston

Kath Weston's highly-acclaimed analysis of gay kinship is examined in the light of the old kinship studies, especially the notion of focality. The verdict is quite contrary to Weston's, viz. that gay kinship and the idea of gay families are structural derivatives of heterosexual kinship and heterosexual families. Weston's work is shown to be part of a larger collectivist project in kinship theory in which key concerns in semantic theory are ignored.     

Photosynthesis and the Web: 2008

The World Wide Web has become an important resource for public awareness and for educating the world’s population, including its political leaders, students, researchers, teachers, and ordinary citizens seeking information. Relevant information on photosynthesis-related web sites is grouped into several categories: (1) group sites, (2) sites by subject, (3) individual researcher’s sites, (4) sites for educators and students, and (5) other useful sites.