Notes on the germination of the endangered species Sclerolaena napiformis (Chenopodiaceae)

Sclerolaena napiformis is found on fertile plains in northern Victoria and southern New South Wales and is endangered Australia-wide. Introductory work on its germination shows that seeds cannot germinate until the woody fruit has broken down. The seeds tolerate a wide range of temperatures for germination, suggesting that germination occurs regardless of season if sufficient rain falls. Seed ageing effects reduce seed viability, but some seed is still viable after two years storage. Flower buds first appear 21 weeks from germination and some fruits have matured by week 29. In the field, plants die back to their taproots in late autumn and resprout in spring. Ninety percent of tagged plants were still alive two years later. The physiological seed dormancy imposed by an intact fruit wall provides a mechanism for the development of persistent soil seed banks. Work on the ecological significance of such banks is needed. The literature on interactions between Sclerolaena fruit and seed biology and ants is briefly reviewed

Matching under Preferences

Matching theory studies how agents and/or objects from different sets can be matched with each other while taking agents\u2019 preferences into account. The theory originated in 1962 with a celebrated paper by David Gale and Lloyd Shapley (1962), in which they proposed the Stable Marriage Algorithm as a solution to the problem of two-sided matching. Since then, this theory has been successfully applied to many real-world problems such as matching students to universities, doctors to hospitals, kidney transplant patients to donors, and tenants to houses. This chapter will focus on algorithmic as well as strategic issues of matching theory. Many large-scale centralized allocation processes can be modelled by matching problems where agents have preferences over one another. For example, in China, over 10 million students apply for admission to higher education annually through a centralized process. The inputs to the matching scheme include the students\u2019 preferences over universities, and vice versa, and the capacities of each university. The task is to construct a matching that is in some sense optimal with respect to these inputs. Economists have long understood the problems with decentralized matching markets, which can suffer from such undesirable properties as unravelling, congestion and exploding offers (see Roth and Xing, 1994, for details). For centralized markets, constructing allocations by hand for large problem instances is clearly infeasible. Thus centralized mechanisms are required for automating the allocation process. Given the large number of agents typically involved, the computational efficiency of a mechanism's underlying algorithm is of paramount importance. Thus we seek polynomial-time algorithms for the underlying matching problems. Equally important are considerations of strategy: an agent (or a coalition of agents) may manipulate their input to the matching scheme (e.g., by misrepresenting their true preferences or underreporting their capacity) in order to try to improve their outcome. A desirable property of a mechanism is strategyproofness, which ensures that it is in the best interests of an agent to behave truthfully

On globally defined semianalytic sets

In this work we present the concept of $C$-semianalytic subset of a real analytic manifold and more generally of a real analytic space. $C$-semianalytic sets can be understood as the natural generalization to the semianalytic setting of global analytic sets introduced by Cartan ($C$-analytic sets for short). More precisely $S$ is a $C$-semianalytic subset of a real analytic space $(X,{\mathcal O}_X)$ if each point of $X$ has a neighborhood $U$ such that $S\cap U$ is a finite boolean combinations of global analytic equalities and strict inequalities on $X$. By means of paracompactness $C$-semianalytic sets are the locally finite unions of finite boolean combinations of global analytic equalities and strict inequalities on $X$. The family of $C$-semianalytic sets is closed under the same operations as the family of semianalytic sets: locally finite unions and intersections, complement, closure, interior, connected components, inverse images under analytic maps, sets of points of dimension $k$, etc. although they are defined involving only global analytic functions. In addition, we characterize subanalytic sets as the images under proper analytic maps of $C$-semianalytic sets. We prove also that the image of a $C$-semianalytic set $S$ under a proper holomorphic map between Stein spaces is again a $C$-semianalytic set. The previous result allows us to understand better the structure of the set $N(X)$ of points of non-coherence of a $C$-analytic subset $X$ of a real analytic manifold $M$. We provide a global geometric-topological description of $N(X)$ inspired by the corresponding local one for analytic sets due to Tancredi-Tognoli (1980), which requires complex analytic normalization. As a consequence it holds that $N(X)$ is a $C$-semianalytic set of dimension $\leq\dim(X)-2$.Comment: 32 pages, 3 figure

Learning about Quantum Gravity with a Couple of Nodes

Loop Quantum Gravity provides a natural truncation of the infinite degrees of freedom of gravity, obtained by studying the theory on a given finite graph. We review this procedure and we present the construction of the canonical theory on a simple graph, formed by only two nodes. We review the U(N) framework, which provides a powerful tool for the canonical study of this model, and a formulation of the system based on spinors. We consider also the covariant theory, which permits to derive the model from a more complex formulation, paying special attention to the cosmological interpretation of the theory

Folate-based single cell screening using surface enhanced Raman microimaging

Recent progress in nanotechnology and its application to biomedical settings have generated great advantages in dealing with early cancer diagnosis. The identification of the specific properties of cancer cells, such as the expression of particular plasma membrane molecular receptors, has become crucial in revealing the presence and in assessing the stage of development of the disease. Here we report a single cell screening approach based on Surface Enhanced Raman Scattering (SERS) microimaging. We fabricated a SERS-labelled nanovector based on the biofunctionalization of gold nanoparticles with folic acid. After treating the cells with the nanovector, we were able to distinguish three different cell populations from different cell lines (cancer HeLa and PC-3, and normal HaCaT lines), suitably chosen for their different expressions of folate binding proteins. The nanovector, indeed, binds much more efficiently on cancer cell lines than on normal ones, resulting in a higher SERS signal measured on cancer cells. These results pave the way for applications in single cell diagnostics and, potentially, in theranostic