28 research outputs found
Prepupal Building Behavior in Drosophila melanogaster and Its Evolution under Resource and Time Constraints.
Structures built by animals are a widespread and ecologically important 'extended phenotype'. While its taxonomic diversity has been well described, factors affecting short-term evolution of building behavior within a species have received little experimental attention. Here we describe how, given the opportunity, wandering Drosophila melanogaster larvae often build long tunnels in agar substrates and embed their pupae within them. These embedded larvae are characterized by a longer egg-to-pupariation developmental time than larvae that pupate on the surface. Assuming that such building behaviors are likely to be energetically costly and/or time consuming, we hypothesized that they should evolve to be less pronounced under resource or time limitation. In accord with this prediction, larvae from populations evolved for 160 generations under a regime that combines larval malnutrition with limited developmental time dug shorter tunnels than larvae from control unselected populations. However, the proportion of larvae that embedded before pupation did not differ between the malnutrition-adapted and control populations, suggesting that tunnel length and likelihood of embedding before pupation are controlled by different genetic loci. The behaviors exhibited by wandering larvae of Drosophila melanogaster prior to pupation offer a model system to study evolution of animal building behaviors because the tunneling and embedding phenotypes are simple, facultative and highly variable
Determinant-Gravity: Cosmological implications
We analyze the action as a possible alternative or addition to the Einstein gravity.
Choosing a particular form of we can restore the
Einstein gravity and, if , we obtain the cosmological constant
term. Taking and expanding the action in , we obtain as a leading term the Einstein Lagrangian with a cosmological
constant proportional to and a series of higher order operators. In
general case of non-vanishing and new cosmological
solutions for the Robertson-Walker metric are obtained.Comment: revtex format, 5 pages,8 figures,references adde
Spallative ablation of dielectrics by X-ray laser
Short laser pulse in wide range of wavelengths, from infrared to X-ray,
disturbs electron-ion equilibrium and rises pressure in a heated layer. The
case where pulse duration is shorter than acoustic relaxation time
is considered in the paper. It is shown that this short pulse may cause
thermomechanical phenomena such as spallative ablation regardless to
wavelength. While the physics of electron-ion relaxation on wavelength and
various electron spectra of substances: there are spectra with an energy gap in
semiconductors and dielectrics opposed to gapless continuous spectra in metals.
The paper describes entire sequence of thermomechanical processes from
expansion, nucleation, foaming, and nanostructuring to spallation with
particular attention to spallation by X-ray pulse
Conformal aspects of Palatini approach in Extended Theories of Gravity
The debate on the physical relevance of conformal transformations can be
faced by taking the Palatini approach into account to gravitational theories.
We show that conformal transformations are not only a mathematical tool to
disentangle gravitational and matter degrees of freedom (passing from the
Jordan frame to the Einstein frame) but they acquire a physical meaning
considering the bi-metric structure of Palatini approach which allows to
distinguish between spacetime structure and geodesic structure. Examples of
higher-order and non-minimally coupled theories are worked out and relevant
cosmological solutions in Einstein frame and Jordan frames are discussed
showing that also the interpretation of cosmological observations can
drastically change depending on the adopted frame
Gravitational excitons from extra dimensions
Inhomogeneous multidimensional cosmological models with a higher dimensional
space-time manifold are investigated under dimensional reduction. In the
Einstein conformal frame, small excitations of the scale factors of the
internal spaces near minima of an effective potential have a form of massive
scalar fields in the external space-time. Parameters of models which ensure
minima of the effective potentials are obtained for particular cases and masses
of gravitational excitons are estimated.Comment: Revised version --- 12 references added, Introduction enlarged, 20
pages, LaTeX, to appear in Phys.Rev.D56 (15.11.97
Non-minimal coupling of the scalar field and inflation
We study the prescriptions for the coupling constant of a scalar field to the
Ricci curvature of spacetime in specific gravity and scalar field theories. The
results are applied to the most popular inflationary scenarios of the universe;
their theoretical consistency and certain observational constraints are
discussed.Comment: 23 pages, LaTex, no figures, to appear in Physical Review
Extended Theories of Gravity and their Cosmological and Astrophysical Applications
We review Extended Theories of Gravity in metric and Palatini formalism
pointing out their cosmological and astrophysical application. The aim is to
propose an alternative approach to solve the puzzles connected to dark
components.Comment: 44 pages, 11 figure
The locust foraging gene.
Our knowledge of how genes act on the nervous system in response to the environment to generate behavioral plasticity is limited. A number of recent advancements in this area concern food-related behaviors and a specific gene family called foraging (for), which encodes a cGMP-dependent protein kinase (PKG). The desert locust (Schistocerca gregaria) is notorious for its destructive feeding and long-term migratory behavior. Locust phase polyphenism is an extreme example of environmentally induced behavioral plasticity. In response to changes in population density, locusts dramatically alter their behavior, from solitary and relatively sedentary behavior to active aggregation and swarming. Very little is known about the molecular and genetic basis of this striking behavioral phenomenon. Here we initiated studies into the locust for gene by identifying, cloning, and studying expression of the gene in the locust brain. We determined the phylogenetic relationships between the locust PKG and other known PKG proteins in insects. FOR expression was found to be confined to neurons of the anterior midline of the brain, the pars intercerebralis. Our results suggest that differences in PKG enzyme activity are correlated to well-established phase-related behavioral differences. These results lay the groundwork for functional studies of the locust for gene and its possible relations to locust phase polyphenism