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In economics, the law of increasing costs is a principle that states that to produce an increasing amount of a good a supplier must give up greater and greater amounts of another good. The best way to look at this is to review an example of an economy that only produces two things - cars and oranges. If all the resources of the economy are put ...
For example, in the Carnot cycle, while the heat flow from a hot reservoir to a cold reservoir represents the increase in the entropy in a cold reservoir, the work output, if reversibly and perfectly stored, represents the decrease in the entropy which could be used to operate the heat engine in reverse, returning to the initial state; thus the ...
Optimal foraging theory predicts that this bee will forage in a way that will maximize its hive's net yield of energy. Optimal foraging theory ( OFT) is a behavioral ecology model that helps predict how an animal behaves when searching for food. Although obtaining food provides the animal with energy, searching for and capturing the food ...
Ecological efficiency is a combination of several related efficiencies that describe resource utilization and the extent to which resources are converted into biomass. [ 1] Exploitation efficiency is the amount of food ingested divided by the amount of prey production ( ) Assimilation efficiency is the amount of assimilation divided by the ...
Exponential growth. Exponential growth is a process that increases quantity over time at an ever-increasing rate. It occurs when the instantaneous rate of change (that is, the derivative) of a quantity with respect to time is proportional to the quantity itself. Described as a function, a quantity undergoing exponential growth is an exponential ...
Biological rules. The pygmy mammoth is an example of insular dwarfism, a case of Foster's rule, its unusually small body size an adaptation to the limited resources of its island home. A biological rule or biological law is a generalized law, principle, or rule of thumb formulated to describe patterns observed in living organisms.
Entropy and life. Research concerning the relationship between the thermodynamic quantity entropy and both the origin and evolution of life began around the turn of the 20th century. In 1910 American historian Henry Adams printed and distributed to university libraries and history professors the small volume A Letter to American Teachers of ...
For example, among genera of Cretaceous molluscs, an increase in size is no more common than stasis or a decrease. [15] In many cases, Cope's rule only operates at certain taxonomic levels (for example, an order may obey Cope's rule, while its constituent families do not), or more generally, it may apply to only some clades of a taxon. [18]