New materials with superior mechanical properties, such as increased strength and hardness, have been developed to allow for new and improved products. However, the mechanical properties that make these materials useful also makes them difficult to process using conventional methods. New machining processes need to be developed to generate products...
Osteoporotic vertebral fractures are a common and costly public health problem with a high occurrence in older women due to menopausal-onset bone loss. Recent findings suggest that mechanical loading created by upper body resistance training can stimulate bone growth in the lumbar spine, reducing osteoporosis-related bone loss and associated fracture...
Practical parallel programming demands that the details of distributing data to processors and inter- processor communication be managed by the compiler. These tasks quickly become too di cult for a programmer to do by hand for all but the simplest parallel programs. Yet, many parallel languages still require the programmer...
Black Rockfish are important commercial and recreational species and understanding their biology is useful in developing best management practices. A common means to assess diet in both freshwater and marine fishes is stomach content analysis, which can determine diet composition and infer foraging behaviors. We conducted a stomach content analysis...
Polyhedra are geometric representations of linear systems of equations and
inequalities. Since polyhedra are used to represent the iteration domains of nested
loop programs, procedures for operating on polyhedra can be used for doing loop
transformations and other program restructuring transformations which are needed
in parallelizing compilers. Thus a need...
The Harderian gland (HG) of the red-sided garter snake, Thamnophis sirtalis parietalis, is a secretory structure that plays a role in the vomeronasal system by solubilizing semiochemicals such as prey chemoattractants and the female sexual attractiveness pheromone. The HG produces secretions containing pheromone-binding proteins that form a complex with pheromone...
To evaluate the impact of hypoxia (< 2 mg O₂ l⁻¹) on habitat quality of pelagic prey fishes in the northern Gulf of Mexico, we used a spatially explicit, bioenergetics-based growth rate potential (GRP) model to develop indices of habitat quality. Our focus was on the pelagic bay anchovy Anchoa...
Tracking footwear wear patterns is vital to the footwear industry. In the game of tennis, there are several court surfaces that produce unique wear patterns on footwear that are constantly changing according to the following factors: level of competition, level of experience, coordination, age, height, weight, and more. By tracking...
Native bees are critically important organisms that support biodiversity and crop production via their pollination services. Wildfires in temperate conifer forests can increase bee abundance and flowering plant density due to increased light exposure, but little information is available regarding how wildfire severity influences provisioning to bee offspring, which is...
Vertebrates communicate with one another and coordinate intraspecific reproduction by using a variety of sexually dimorphic signals, such as plumage, ornaments, sounds, and/or scents. These sexual dimorphisms are maintained by physiological factors, typically sex-specific hormones (though see Chapter 3 for an exception). The purpose of the research in this dissertation...