Prostomium Morphology as a Criterion for the Identification of Nephtyid Polychaetes (Annelida : Phyllodocida), with Reference to the Taxonomic Status of Aglaophamus neotenus

The morphology of the prostomium is suggested as a taxonomic character in Nephtyidae. In the present study, the prostomium morphology of eight species of Nephtys (N. australiensis, N. gravieri, N. semiverrucosa, N. inomata, N. mesobranchia, N. oligobranchia, N. po(ybranchia and N. sukumoensis) which show replacement of barred (laddered) setae was examined. Characteristics of the shape of the antennae and their position were used to divide these species into two groups, one consisting of the first three species and the other, the remaining five species. The two groups are suggested to have different phylogenetic origins. The present study also suggested that Aglaophamus neotenus should be placed in Nephtys as Nephtys neotena new combination

Link-wise Artificial Compressibility Method

The Artificial Compressibility Method (ACM) for the incompressible Navier-Stokes equations is (link-wise) reformulated (referred to as LW-ACM) by a finite set of discrete directions (links) on a regular Cartesian mesh, in analogy with the Lattice Boltzmann Method (LBM). The main advantage is the possibility of exploiting well established technologies originally developed for LBM and classical computational fluid dynamics, with special emphasis on finite differences (at least in the present paper), at the cost of minor changes. For instance, wall boundaries not aligned with the background Cartesian mesh can be taken into account by tracing the intersections of each link with the wall (analogously to LBM technology). LW-ACM requires no high-order moments beyond hydrodynamics (often referred to as ghost moments) and no kinetic expansion. Like finite difference schemes, only standard Taylor expansion is needed for analyzing consistency. Preliminary efforts towards optimal implementations have shown that LW-ACM is capable of similar computational speed as optimized (BGK-) LBM. In addition, the memory demand is significantly smaller than (BGK-) LBM. Importantly, with an efficient implementation, this algorithm may be one of the few which is compute-bound and not memory-bound. Two- and three-dimensional benchmarks are investigated, and an extensive comparative study between the present approach and state of the art methods from the literature is carried out. Numerical evidences suggest that LW-ACM represents an excellent alternative in terms of simplicity, stability and accuracy.Comment: 62 pages, 20 figure

Growth curve of the body weight, body length and tail length in the cotton rat (Sigmodon hispidus)

The body weight (BW), body length (BL) and tail length (TL) of 202 cotton rats, 102 males and 100 females. were measured. Significant sex differences in the BW were observed 3 weeks after birth. The BLs in one-day-old males and females were 8.33 = 0.36 cm and 7.82 +/- 0.69 cm respectively, while the TLs were 2.98 +/- 0.12 cm and 2.88 + 0.28 cm. Growth of the BL and TL was rapid until about 8th week of age, when a steady length was reached. The equations in males were BL (em) = 8.07 + 0.23 x BW (g) - 0.00068 x BW (g)2, TL (em) = 2.79 + 0.11 x BW (g) -0.00037 x BW (g)2 and TL (cm) = — 2.21 + 0.67 x BL (em) — 0.0068 >< BL (cm)2. Correlations among the BW, BL and TL in male and female cotton rats were all highly significant (r 20.98, P < 0.001)