Historical and other considerations regarding the crystal form of sodium-ammonium d- and l-tartrate,potassium d- and l-tartrate,potassium-ammonium d- and l-tartrate,and potassium racemate.—II

In 1914, the physics discipline had reached a very similar stage of development in Australia and Japan. A generation later the paths of development had considerably diverged. A systematic comparison of the evolution of physics in the two countries during these years identifies factors—political, economic and cultural—that led to this divergence, but it also uncovers a number of underlying parallels.     

好氧颗粒污泥的研究

好氧颗粒污泥是一种全新概念的污水生物处理技术。介绍了好氧颗粒污泥技术的理论基础,包括好氧污泥形成机理及理化特性研究,探讨了影响好氧颗粒污泥形成的因素以及工业应用的方向和前景。     

Detecting positive darwinian selection in brain-expressed genes during human evolution

To understand the genetic basis that underlies the phenotypic divergence between human and non- human primates, we screened a total of 7176 protein-coding genes expressed in the human brain and compared them with the chimpanzee orthologs to identify genes that show evidence of rapid evolution in the human lineage. Our results showed that the nonsynonymous/synonymous substitution (Ka/Ks) ratio for genes expressed in the brain of human and chimpanzee is 0.3854, suggesting that the brain-expressed genes are under functional constraint. The X-linked human brain-expressed genes evolved more rapidly than autosomal ones. We further dissected the molecular evolutionary patterns of 34 candidate genes by sequencing representative primate species to identify lineage-specific adaptive evolution. Fifteen out of the 34 candidate genes showed evidence of positive Darwinian selection in human and/or chimpanzee lineages. These genes are predicted to play diverse functional roles in em- bryonic development, spermatogenesis and male fertility, signal transduction, sensory nociception, and neural function. This study together with others demonstrated the usefulness and power of phy- logenetic comparison of multiple closely related species in detecting lineage-specific adaptive evolu- tion, and the identification of the positively selected brain-expressed genes may add new knowledge to the understanding of molecular mechanism of human origin.     

Migration rates of human populations from surname distributions

Migration is an important factor in the biological evolution of human populations, and surnames provide one of the simplest records of identification. The distribution of surnames can supply quantitative information on the structure of human populations. Surnames considered as alleles of a gene transmitted only by the male line can be assumed to be neutral markers and therefore satisfy the expectations of the neutral theory of evolution, which is entirely described by random genetic drift, mutation and migration. As data on surnames are easier to collect than those from genes, the information yield is potentially increased, but the validity of the conclusions must be tested in actual samples. The purpose of this report is to compare the estimates of migration rates in Italy, as inferred by the surname distribution found in the telephone directories and other sources, with the corresponding estimates from official demographic sources. Our findings show that in these samples the ratio of surnames to individuals makes it possible to calculate reliable estimates of migration rates.     

Y chromosome sequence variation and the history of human populations

Binary polymorphisms associated with the non-recombining region of the human Y chromosome (NRY) preserve the paternal genetic legacy of our species that has persisted to the present, permitting inference of human evolution, population affinity and demographic history. We used denaturing high-performance liquid chromatography (DHPLC; ref. 2) to identify 160 of the 166 bi-allelic and 1 tri-allelic site that formed a parsimonious genealogy of 116 haplotypes, several of which display distinct population affinities based on the analysis of 1062 globally representative individuals. A minority of contemporary East Africans and Khoisan represent the descendants of the most ancestral patrilineages of anatomically modern humans that left Africa between 35,000 and 89,000 years ago.