Functional Response of Venus Flytraps (Dionaea muscipula)

The feeding response of Venus flytraps (Dionaea muscipula) is widely studied, and many studies have considered the selectivity of prey capture in D. muscipula (Lichtner and Williams, 1977; Hutchens and Luken, 2009). The consumption rate of an organism relative to the abundance or availability of its food is known as that organism\u27s functional response (Jeschke et al., 2004). In this study, a functional response curve will be constructed for D. muscipula based on its response to increasing availability of small prey in the laboratory. Knowledge of functional responses is important for various fields of biology including population biology, evolutionary biology, ethology, and physiology because functional responses can provide a wide variety of information such as fitness and mortality risk (Jeschke et al., 2004). This study will hopefully provide a better understanding of the intricate relationship between Venus flytraps and their prey. I predict that Venus flytraps will elicit a type I functional response because they can capture prey while handling other food items and seem to be able to obtain food items at a maximum rate until all traps are full. These are conditions that must be met for a type I response (Jeschke et al., 2004). In this study, ants will be provided as prey for Venus flytraps to determine the type of functional response exhibited by the plants

Sex and the city: branding, gender and the commodification of sex consumption in contemporary retailing

This paper explores the changing spatiality of the sex retail industry in England and Wales, from highly regulated male orientated sex shops, pushed to the legislative margins of the city and social respectability, towards the emergence of unregulated female orientated ‘erotic boutiques’ located visibly in city centres. This is achieved through an exploration of the oppositional binaries of perceptions of sex shops as dark, dirty, male orientated, and ‘seedy’ and erotic boutiques as light, female orientated and stylish, showing how such discourses are embedded in the physical space, design and marketing of the stores and the products sold within them. More specifically, the paper analyses how female orientated sex stores utilise light, colour and design to create an ‘upscaling’ of sexual consumerism and reflects on what the emergence of up-scale female spaces for sexual consumption in the central city might mean in terms of theorisations of the intersectionality between agency, power, gender and class. The paper thus considers how the shifting packaging and presentation of sex-product consumption in the contemporary city alters both its acceptability and visibility

Atlanta\u27s Flood Risk: A Model Based on Growth and Climate Change

Climate change poses unique and significant challenges for Georgia’s large and growing cities. Ranked as the second-best city in the United States for millennials, the city of Atlanta and the surrounding region is expected gain 2.5 million people in the next twenty years. Sustainable development strategies to accommodate the combination of changing climate and substantial population growth requires planning beyond simply finding open space. Planners must look to more detailed solutions to mitigate long-term impacts of rapid urbanization within a non-stationary climate. Regions within the city of Atlanta are already prone to flooding during heavy rain events, the Downtown Connector being one site that routinely floods after receiving several inches of rain. As the changing global climate is expected to produce heavy rain events across the southeastern United States, determining which areas of the city are prone to flooding will be even more important. The goal of this research is to predict which regions of the Metro Statistical Area (MSA) of Atlanta will be at higher risk of flash flooding in the year 2050, based on land cover change, precipitation models, and elevation. Predicted land use for year 2050 is produced with a cellular automata Markov chain, based on change in the National Land Cover Database from years 2001 to 2016. Predicted rainfall based on current conditions is derived using a ten-year average of Georgia Automated Environmental Monitoring Network (GAEMN) precipitation observations and inverse distance weighting interpolation across the study area. An Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) estimate of future precipitation is also obtained to examine flood risk based on predicted climate change. These models are used to generate flood vulnerability maps for the MSA of Atlanta in year 2050

Marshall University Department of Music presents a Junior Recital - Amber Martin, soprano and Mark Smith, piano

https://mds.marshall.edu/music_perf/1009/thumbnail.jp

Floating solar panel park

Treball desenvolupat dins el marc del programa 'European Project Semester'.This Final Report is the culmination of a four month long design study on floating solar panel park feasibility in Vaasa, Finland. The Floating Ideas Team was tasked with coming up with a design that would not only work, but also make a profit. The team focused a lot of time on initial research, an iterative design process, and experiments to gather information that could not be found during the research phase. In this report, one can expect to find the major findings from research in many different areas such as location, panel design, flotation design, cooling techniques, and efficiency adding techniques. The first takeaway is that implementing floating solar parks in Finland would require adding efficiency techniques such as mirrors or concentrators. Second, how the panels are placed means a lot in a location so far north. Placing the panels far away from each other and horizontally will reduce the negative impact of shadows. And third, the rotation of the structure is important in increasing efficiency. Multiple axis tracking is not necessary, but tracking in the vertical axis can add a 50% increase in power generated. This research then lead into the defining of four initial designs which were eventually paired down into one. The largest factors leading to the change in design were the combination of rotation and anchoring methods, the flotation structure, and the structure required hold the panel modules together. In the end, the final design is a modular circular design with panels and mirrors to help add efficiency, approximately 37%. From there, an economic and environmental feasibility study was done and for both, this design was deemed feasible for Finland. With the design, detailed in this report, it would be possible to implement this and make a profit off of it, leading the team to believe that this should be implemented in places looking for alternatives for renewable energy production

Casanovas are liars : behavioral syndromes, sperm competition risk, and the evolution of deceptive male mating behavior in live-bearing fishes [version 2; referees: 2 approved, 1 approved with reservations]

Male reproductive biology can by characterized through competition over mates as well as mate choice. Multiple mating and male mate choice copying, especially in internally fertilizing species, set the stage for increased sperm competition, i.e., sperm of two or more males can compete for fertilization of the female’s ova. In the internally fertilizing fish Poecilia mexicana, males respond to the presence of rivals with reduced expression of mating preferences (audience effect), thereby lowering the risk of by-standing rivals copying their mate choice. Also, males interact initially more with a non-preferred female when observed by a rival, which has been interpreted in previous studies as a strategy to mislead rivals, again reducing sperm competition risk (SCR). Nevertheless, species might differ consistently in their expression of aggressive and reproductive behaviors, possibly due to varying levels of SCR. In the current study, we present a unique data set comprising ten poeciliid species (in two cases including multiple populations) and ask whether species can be characterized through consistent differences in the expression of aggression, sexual activity and changes in mate choice under increased SCR. We found consistent species-specific differences in aggressive behavior, sexual activity as well as in the level of misleading behavior, while decreased preference expression under increased SCR was a general feature of all but one species examined. Furthermore, mean sexual activity correlated positively with the occurrence of potentially misleading behavior. An alternative explanation for audience effects would be that males attempt to avoid aggressive encounters, which would predict stronger audience effects in more aggressive species. We demonstrate a positive correlation between mean aggressiveness and sexual activity (suggesting a hormonal link as a mechanistic explanation), but did not detect a correlation between aggressiveness and audience effects. Suites of correlated behavioral tendencies are termed behavioral syndromes, and our present study provides correlational evidence for the evolutionary significance of SCR in shaping a behavioral syndrome at the species level across poeciliid taxa

Understanding brønsted-acid catalyzed monomolecular reactions of Alkanes in Zeolite Pores by combining insights from experiment and theory

Acidic zeolites are effective catalysts for the cracking of large hydrocarbon molecules into lower molecular weight products required for transportation fuels. However, the ways in which the zeolite structure affects the catalytic activity at BrOnsted protons are not fully understood. One way to characterize the influence of the zeolite structure on the catalysis is to study alkane cracking and dehydrogenation at very low conversion, conditions for which the kinetics are well defined. To understand the effects of zeolite structure on the measured rate coefficient (k(app)), it is necessary to identify the equilibrium constant for adsorption into the reactant state (Kads-H+) and the intrinsic rate coefficient of the reaction (k(int)) at reaction temperatures, since k(app) is proportional to the product of Kads-H+ and k(int). We show that Kads-H+ cannot be calculated from experimental adsorption data collected near ambient temperature, but can, however, be estimated accurately from configurational-bias Monte Carlo (CBMC) simulations. Using monomolecular cracking and dehydrogenation of C-3-C-6 alkanes as an example, we review recent efforts aimed at elucidating the influence of the acid site location and the zeolite framework structure on the observed values of k(app) and its components, Kads-H+ and k(int)

The EGNoG Survey: Gas Excitation in Normal Galaxies at z~0.3

As observations of molecular gas in galaxies are pushed to lower star formation rate galaxies at higher redshifts, it is becoming increasingly important to understand the conditions of the gas in these systems to properly infer their molecular gas content. The rotational transitions of the carbon monoxide (CO) molecule provide an excellent probe of the gas excitation conditions in these galaxies. In this paper we present the results from the gas excitation sample of the Evolution of molecular Gas in Normal Galaxies (EGNoG) survey at the Combined Array for Research in Millimeter-wave Astronomy (CARMA). This subset of the full EGNoG sample consists of four galaxies at z~0.3 with star formation rates of 40-65 M_Sun yr^-1 and stellar masses of ~2x10^11 M_Sun. Using the 3 mm and 1 mm bands at CARMA, we observe both the CO(1-0) and CO(3-2) transitions in these four galaxies in order to probe the excitation of the molecular gas. We report robust detections of both lines in three galaxies (and an upper limit on the fourth), with an average line ratio, r_31 = L'_CO(3-2) / L'_CO(1-0), of 0.46 \pm 0.07 (with systematic errors \lesssim 40%), which implies sub-thermal excitation of the CO(3-2) line. We conclude that the excitation of the gas in these massive, highly star-forming galaxies is consistent with normal star-forming galaxies such as local spirals, not starbursting systems like local ultra-luminous infrared galaxies. Since the EGNoG gas excitation sample galaxies are selected from the main sequence of star-forming galaxies, we suggest that this result is applicable to studies of main sequence galaxies at intermediate and high redshifts, supporting the assumptions made in studies that find molecular gas fractions in star forming galaxies at z~1-2 to be an order of magnitude larger than what is observed locally.Comment: Accepted for publication in the Astrophysical Journal, to appear January 2013; 18 pages, 10 figures, 6 table