Phenotypic flexibility (reversible phenotypic change) enables organisms to couple internal, ontogenetic responses with external, environmental cues. Phenotypic flexibility also provides organisms with the capacity to buffer stereotypical internal, developmental processes from unpredictable external, ecological events. Echinoids exhibit dramatic phenotypic flexibility in response to variation in exogenous nutrient supplies. The extent to which echinoids display this flexibility has been explored incompletely and research hitherto has been conducted predominantly on larval structures and morphologies. We investigated experimentally the extent to which the primordial juvenile, the developing rudiment, can exhibit the first phase in phenotypic flexibility among individuals. We report for the first time on rudiment regression and complete resorption as a response to starvation during larval development in the sea urchin Strongylocentrotus droebachiensis (O.F. Müller, 1776) and identify a developmental “window of opportunity” within which this can occur. Based on our observations and previous suggestions, we speculate that sea urchin rudiments might provide means of buffering development during unfavorable conditions.
Neutron stars can capture asymmetric dark matter (ADM), which affects the neutron star's measurable properties and makes compact objects prime targets to search for ADM. In this work, we use Bayesian inference to explore potential neutron star mass-radius measurements, from current and future X-ray telescopes, to constrain the bosonic ADM parameters for the case where bosonic ADM has accumulated in the neutron star interior. We find that the high bosonic ADM particle mass (mχ) and low effective self-interaction strength (gχ/m φ ) regime is disfavored due to the observationally and theoretically motivated constraint that neutron stars must have at least a mass of 1 M . However, within the remaining parameter space, mχ and gχ/m φ are individually unconstrained. On the other hand, the ADM mass-fraction, i.e., the fraction of ADM mass inside the neutron star, can be constrained by such neutron star measurements. The inclusion of bosonic ADM in neutron star cores also relaxes the constraints on the baryonic equation of state space and suggests that ADM should be taken into account when interpreting constraints from mass-radius measurements.
Keyness is a commonly used method in corpus linguistics and is assumed to identify key items that are characteristic of 1 corpus when compared to another. This paper puts this assumption to the test by comparing case study corpora in the fields of genetic, immunological and psychiatric biomedical association studies, using what we refer to as a ‘K-FLUX’ analysis to produce a set of key items. Experts from within these fields are asked to evaluate the extent to which identified key items are characteristic of their discipline. The paper concludes that less than 50% of the items identified by the method are rated as highly characteristic by experts and that this ranges between types of association study. Further, there is difficulty in reaching a consensus over what is deemed to be ‘characteristic’, thus posing a challenge to the ultimate aim of the keyness method. The paper demonstrates the value of supporting corpus linguistic studies with expert assessments to evaluate whether (and which) items can be said to be indicative of a particular field.
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