Price-based empirical evidence on the extent to which product markets are integrated in developing regions is noticeably limited, particularly in Africa. This article uses highly disaggregated retail price data for twenty-four narrowly defined products collected at the district level in four Southern African Development Community (SADC) countries (Botswana, Malawi, South Africa and Zambia) to a…

What makes us human is one of the most interesting and enduring questions in evolutionary biology. To assist in answering this question, we have identified insertions in the human genome which cannot be found in five comparison primate species: Chimpanzee, gorilla, orangutan, gibbon, and macaque. A total of 21,269 nonpolymorphic human-specific insertions were identified,…

Collocation dictionaries are primarily encoding in terms of both data categories (i.e. combination-oriented and selection-oriented information) and data presentation (i.e. onomasiological arrangement). However, the two-dimensional encoding nature of collocation dictionaries receives insufficient attention in lexicographical practice, thus limiting dictionaries’ capability to meet users’ sel…

Mammalian sex chromosomes evolved from the degeneration of one homolog of a pair of ancestral autosomes, the proto-Y. This resulted in a gene dose imbalance that is believed to be restored (partially or fully) through upregulation of gene expression from the single activeX-chromosome in both sexes by adosage compensatory mechanism. We analyzed multiple genome-wide RNA stability data sets and fo…

This paper looks at Erazm Rykaczewski’s A Complete Dictionary English and Polish . . . (1849), one of the milestones in the history of English-Polish / Polish-English lexicography. Despite its significance for the bilingual user in Poland and English-speaking countries with large Polish diasporas, where it came to be reprinted over the next century, it has attracted little scholarly attentio…

Investigating dictionary use is not only essential to the process of dictionary compilation and evaluation but equally to establishing a best practice of strategic dictionary consultation. User research of the past few decades has tended to focus either on pedagogical lexicography or the evaluation of specific lexicographic resources. In particular, the proportion of investigations in specialis…

Gene duplication provides large numbers of new genes that can lead to the evolution of new functions. Duplicated genes can diverge by changes in sequences, expression patterns, and functions. Micro RNAs play an important role in the regulation of gene expression in many eukaryotes. After duplication, two paralogs may diverge in their micro RNA binding sites,which might impact their expression a…

Epigenetic control of gene expression has important implications for the regulation of developmental processes, for mediating homeostasis and responses to the external environment, and for transgenerational inheritance of gene expression patterns. Genes that mediate epigenetic control have been well-characterized in Drosophila melanogaster, and we have identified and analyz edan orthologo…

The pronouncements of the ENCODE Project Consortium regarding “junkDNA” exposed the need for a nevolutionary classification of genomic elements according to their selected-effect function. In the classifications cheme presented here, we divide the genome into “functional DNA,” that is,DNA sequences that have a selected-effect function, and “rubbish DNA,” that is, sequen…

The naked mole-rat (Heterocephalus glaber) is the only rodent species that naturally lacks fur. Genome sequencing of this atypical rodent species recently shed light on a number of its morphological and physiological adaptations. More specifically, its hairless phenotype has been traced back to a single amino acid change (C397W) in the hair growth associated (HR) protein(or Hairless). By …