Hasil untuk "Fossil man. Human paleontology"

WANG Shi-Qi, MA Jiao, FU Jiao, BAI Wei-Peng

This study documents a skull of the large cervid Nipponicervus longdanensis from the Early Pleistocene (~2.6-2.1 Ma) of Longdan, Gansu, China. Morphological comparisons indicate that N. longdanensis exhibits the type of “adaptive” distal fork (anterior tine smaller and oriented along the beam) that differs from the type species Nipponicervus praenipponicus, while it is aligned with Metacervocerus Dietrich, 1938, necessitating reclassification as Metacervocerus longdanensis. The cranium exhibits posteriorly inclined pedicles demonstrating phylogenetic affinity with M. elegans (Nihewan Basin) and M. rhenanus (Europe), while derived features including a shortened neurocranium, rostrally tapered basioccipital, and duplicated P4 protocone distinguish it as an advanced lineage within the genus. Character assessments reveal that Metacervocerus is potentially paraphyletic because Metacervocerus? shansius and Metacervocerus? punjabiensis retain plesiomorphic conditions (elongated braincase, simple P4 morphology), while they exhibit pronouncedly erected pedicles and lyrated antler beams, suggesting a divergent lineage from Metacervocerus longdanensis. Previously published isotopic data (δ13C = −10.9‰ ± 0.9‰, δ18O = −7.5‰ ± 0.9‰, n = 4) indicate a semi-open habitat and a browsing-to-mixed feeding ecology of M. longdanensis. This revision resolves persistent taxonomic uncertainties in Eurasian Cervinae while elucidating East Asia’s biogeographic significance in driving cervid morphological radiation during the Plio-Pleistocene transition.

Anaïs Travers, Marine Fau, Michel Roux et al.

A new starfish fauna from the Late Burdigalian (Early Miocene) of the Apt basin (Rhodano-Provençal gulf, southeastern France) is described here. This new starfish fauna comes from accumulation levels of marine invertebrates, including exceptionally well-preserved pectinid bivalves and echinoderms. Among the echinoderms, the sea urchins are the most abundant, closely followed by the starfish. This is the first time the starfish fauna is being studied in detail. Here are described twelve additional specimens of Lacosteaster lauerorum Gale & Ward, 2024 (Solasteridae, Valvatida) with the first description of the abactinal face of the species, an undetermined species of Astropecten (Astropectinidae, Paxillosida), and two new genera and species: Cruciformaster pedicellarius gen. nov. et sp. nov. (Oreasteridae, Valvatida) and Menerbesaster bongrainae gen. nov. et sp. nov. (Echinasteridae, Spinulosida).

Paluck Deep, Monica Bharadhidasan, A. Baki Kocaballi

Personas have been widely used to understand and communicate user needs in human-centred design. Despite their utility, they may fail to meet the demands of iterative workflows due to their static nature, limited engagement, and inability to adapt to evolving design needs. Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) pave the way for more engaging and adaptive approaches to user representation. This paper introduces Interactive Virtual Personas (IVPs): multimodal, LLM-driven, conversational user simulations that designers can interview, brainstorm with, and gather feedback from in real time via voice interface. We conducted a qualitative study with eight professional UX designers, employing an IVP named "Alice" across three design activities: user research, ideation, and prototype evaluation. Our findings demonstrate the potential of IVPs to expedite information gathering, inspire design solutions, and provide rapid user-like feedback. However, designers raised concerns about biases, over-optimism, the challenge of ensuring authenticity without real stakeholder input, and the inability of the IVP to fully replicate the nuances of human interaction. Our participants emphasised that IVPs should be viewed as a complement to, not a replacement for, real user engagement. We discuss strategies for prompt engineering, human-in-the-loop integration, and ethical considerations for effective and responsible IVP use in design. Finally, our work contributes to the growing body of research on generative AI in the design process by providing insights into UX designers' experiences of LLM-powered interactive personas.

Yun Dai

This chapter explores human creativity in AI-assisted learning environments through the lens of student agency. We begin by examining four theoretical perspectives on agency, including instrumental, effortful, dynamically emergent, and authorial agency, and analyze how each frames the relationship between agency and creativity. Under each theoretical perspective, we discuss how the integration of generative AI (GenAI) tools reshapes these dynamics by altering students' roles in cognitive, social, and creative processes. In the second part, we introduce a theoretical framework for AI agentic engagement, contextualizing agency within specific cognitive, relational, and ethical dynamics introduced by GenAI tools. This framework is linked to the concept of Mini-c creativity, emphasizing personal relevance and self-directed learning. Together, these perspectives support a shift from viewing creativity as product-oriented to understanding it as a process of agentive participation and meaning-making. We conclude with two directions for future research focused on the creative process and performance in AI-assisted learning.

Yuhao Sun, Albert Tenesa, John Vines

Precision Medicine (PM) transforms the traditional "one-drug-fits-all" paradigm by customising treatments based on individual characteristics, and is an emerging topic for HCI research on digital health. A key element of PM, the Polygenic Risk Score (PRS), uses genetic data to predict an individual's disease risk. Despite its potential, PRS faces barriers to adoption, such as data inclusivity, psychological impact, and public trust. We conducted a mixed-methods study to explore how people perceive PRS, formed of surveys (n=254) and interviews (n=11) with UK-based participants. The interviews were supplemented by interactive storyboards with the ContraVision technique to provoke deeper reflection and discussion. We identified ten key barriers and five themes to PRS adoption and proposed design implications for a responsible PRS framework. To address the complexities of PRS and enhance broader PM practices, we introduce the term Human-Precision Medicine Interaction (HPMI), which integrates, adapts, and extends HCI approaches to better meet these challenges.

Yun Wan, Yoram M Kalman

Recent studies suggest that while generative AI (GenAI) can enhance individual creativity, it often reduces the diversity of collective outputs. A well-known example of this homogenization effect is by Doshi and Hauser (2024) who found that GenAI-generated plot ideas improved story writing creativity but led to convergence across writers' outputs. This study extends their experiment, identifying the design choices behind the apparent creativity-diversity trade-off. In Phase 1, we used structured prompting with 10 diverse GenAI personas to generate 300 story plots, and confirmed the plots' diversity using text embedding analysis. In Phase 2, participants wrote stories with or without access to these plots. Results show that diverse GenAI inputs can preserve story diversity compared to a human-only baseline, with some evidence of enhancement in the 1-plot condition. Beyond addressing the diversity component of the trade-off, our findings offer broader insights for human-AI system design. Our findings suggest that the trade-off may emerge from uniform deployment practices rather than from an inherent limitation of GenAI, and that diversity can be intentionally built into AI-mediated collaboration. Our study highlights the risks of over-standardization, the importance of prompt variation, and the value of treating GenAI not as a static tool but as a configurable partner. These insights have important implications for the design of GenAI systems that support, not constrain, collective creativity.

Ann-Kathrin Schuetz, Alexander Migala, Adam Boesky et al.

The first detection of gravitational waves, recognized by the 2017 Nobel Prize in Physics, has opened up a new research field: gravitational-wave paleontology. When massive stars evolve into black holes and collide, they create gravitational waves that propagate through space and time. These gravitational-waves, now detectable on Earth, act as fossils tracing the histories of the massive stars that created them. Estimating physics parameters of these massive stars from detected gravitational-waves is a parameter estimation task, with the primary difficulty being the extreme rarity of collisions in simulated binary black holes. This rarity forces researchers to choose between prohibitively expensive simulations or accepting substantial statistical variance. In this work, we present RESOLVE, a rare event surrogate model that leverages polynomial chaos expansion (PCE) and Bayesian MCMC to emulate this rare formation efficiency. Our experimental results demonstrate that RESOLVE is the only surrogate model that achieves proper statistical coverage, while effectively learning the underlying distribution of each physics parameter. We construct a likelihood function incorporating both the emulated formation efficiency and LIGO's gravitational wave observations, which we then minimize to produce community-standard credible intervals for each physics parameter. These results enable astronomers to gain deeper insights into how the universe transformed from simple gases into the complex chemical environment that eventually made life possible.

Honggang Zhang, Chang-Fu Zhou, Zhe-Xi Luo

Recently, a dinosaur assemblage with three-dimensional preservation of the Early Cretaceous Jehol Biota has been discovered in the Ningcheng Basin, Inner Mongolia, China. Of the vertebrate fossils, a new spalacotherioid “symmetro-dont” mammal is described here as Ningchengodon foxi gen. et sp. nov. The specimen is an incomplete right dentary characterized by a lower dental formula of i3/c1/p3/m5, with molar cusps in acute-triangulation. Cusps e and f embraced cusp d of the preceding molar forming a molar interlocking, reported here for the first time for acute-angled spalaco-therioids. Phylogenetically, the new taxon is placed in the clade of Spalacotherioidea, and clustered at the base of the paraphyletic zhangheotheriids although its relationship is not further resolved with other zhangheotheriids. Additionally, the ultimate premolar replacement is simultaneous with the m5 eruption as in Origolestes lii and Zhangheotherium quinquecuspidens. This discovery enriches the biodiversity of spalacotherioids, and further highlights the complexity of the Zhangheotheriidae in evolution.

Swiss Journal of Palaeontology

Ivan Durango, Jose A. Gallud, Victor M. R. Penichet

In an age defined by rapid data expansion, the connection between individuals and their digital footprints has become more intricate. The Human-Data Interaction (HDI) framework has become an essential approach to tackling the challenges and ethical issues associated with data governance and utilization in the modern digital world. This paper outlines the fundamental steps required for organizations to seamlessly integrate HDI principles, emphasizing auditing, aligning, formulating considerations, and the need for continuous monitoring and adaptation. Through a thorough audit, organizations can critically assess their current data management practices, trace the data lifecycle from collection to disposal, and evaluate the effectiveness of existing policies, security protocols, and user interfaces. The next step involves aligning these practices with the main HDI principles, such as informed consent, data transparency, user control, algorithm transparency, and ethical data use, to identify gaps that need strategic action. Formulating preliminary considerations includes developing policies and technical solutions to close identified gaps, ensuring that these practices not only meet legal standards, but also promote fairness and accountability in data interactions. The final step, monitoring and adaptation, highlights the need for setting up continuous evaluation mechanisms and being responsive to technological, regulatory, and societal developments, ensuring HDI practices stay up-to-date and effective. Successful implementation of the HDI framework requires multi-disciplinary collaboration, incorporating insights from technology, law, ethics, and user experience design. The paper posits that this comprehensive approach is vital for building trust and legitimacy in digital environments, ultimately leading to more ethical, transparent, and user-centric data interactions.

Milena Tsvetkova, Taha Yasseri, Niccolo Pescetelli et al.

From fake social media accounts and generative artificial intelligence chatbots to trading algorithms and self-driving vehicles, robots, bots and algorithms are proliferating and permeating our communication channels, social interactions, economic transactions and transportation arteries. Networks of multiple interdependent and interacting humans and intelligent machines constitute complex social systems for which the collective outcomes cannot be deduced from either human or machine behaviour alone. Under this paradigm, we review recent research and identify general dynamics and patterns in situations of competition, coordination, cooperation, contagion and collective decision-making, with context-rich examples from high-frequency trading markets, a social media platform, an open collaboration community and a discussion forum. To ensure more robust and resilient human-machine communities, we require a new sociology of humans and machines. Researchers should study these communities using complex system methods; engineers should explicitly design artificial intelligence for human-machine and machine-machine interactions; and regulators should govern the ecological diversity and social co-development of humans and machines.

H. Little, Talia S Karim, Erica Krimmel et al.

Over the last decade, the United States paleontological collections community has invested heavily in the digitization of specimen-based data, including over 10 million USD funded through the National Science Foundation’s Advancing Digitization of Biodiversity Collections program. Fossil specimen data—9.0 million records and counting (Global Biodiversity Information Facility 2024)—are now accessible on open science platforms such as the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF). However, the full potential of this data is far from realized due to fundamental challenges associated with mobilization, discoverability, and interoperability of paleontological information within the existing cyberinfrastructure landscape and data pipelines. Additionally, it can be difficult for individuals with varying expertise to develop a comprehensive understanding of the existing landscape due to its breadth and complexity. Here, we present preliminary results from a project aiming to explore how we might address these problems. Funding from the US National Science Foundation (NSF) to the University of Colorado Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, and Arizona State University will result in, among other products, an “ecosystem map” for the paleontological collections community. This map will be an information-rich visualization of entities (e.g. concepts, systems, platforms, mechanisms, drivers, tools, documentation, data, standards, people, organizations) operating in, intersecting with, or existing in parallel to our domain. We are inspired and informed by similar efforts to map the biodiversity informatics landscape (Bingham et al. 2017) and the research infrastructure landscape (Distributed System of Scientific Collections 2024), as well as by many ongoing metadata cataloging projects, e.g. re3data and the Global Registry of Scientific Collections (GRSciColl). Our strategy for developing this ecosystem map is to model the existing information and systems landscape by characterizing entities, e.g. potentially in a graph database as nodes with relationships to other nodes. The ecosystem map will enable us to provide guidance for communities working across different sectors of the landscape, promoting a shared understanding of the ecosystem that everyone works in together. We can also use the map to identify points of entry and engagement at various stages of the paleontological data process, and to engage diverse members within the paleontological community. We see three primary user types for this map: people new(er) to the community, people with expertise in a subset of the community, and people working to integrate initiatives and systems across communities. Each of these user types needs tailored access to the ecosystem map and its community knowledge. By promoting shared knowledge with the map, users will be able to identify their own space within the ecosystem and the connections or partnerships that they can utilize to expand their knowledge or resources, relieving the burden on any single individual to hold a comprehensive understanding. For example, the flow of taxonomic information between publications, collections, digital resources, and biodiversity aggregators is not straightforward or easy to understand. A person with expertise in collections care may want to use the ecosystem map to understand why taxonomic identifications associated with their specimen occurrence records are showing up incorrectly when published to GBIF. We envision that our final ecosystem map will visualize the flow of taxonomic information and how it is used to interpret specimen occurrence data, thereby highlighting to this user where problems may be happening and whom to ask for help in addressing them (Fig. 1). Ultimately, development of this map will allow us to identify mobilization pathways for paleontological data, highlight core cyberinfrastructure resources, define cyberinfrastructure gaps, strategize future partnerships, promote shared knowledge, and engage a broader array of expertise in the process. Contributing domain-based evidence FAIRly*2 requires expertise that bridges the content (e.g. paleontology) and the mechanics (e.g. informatics). By centering the role of humans in open science cyberinfrastructure throughout our process, we hope to develop systems that create and sustain such expertise.

JOSEPH P. BOTTING, LUCY A. MUIR

chiurans (spoonworms) are a very distinctive group of polychaete annelids that had long been considered to constitute a separate phylum. Their fossil record is extremely limited, although trace fossils that have been suggested to be attributable to them date back as far as the Cambrian Period. The oldest body fossils are from the Carboniferous Mazon Creek Biota, and preserve only limited morphological detail. New material from the Middle Ordovician (Darrivilian, Didymograptus murchisoni Biozone) Castle Bank Biota of Wales shows fine detail of the morphology of a new taxon, Llwygarua suzannae gen. et sp. nov., including several details that indicate an assignment to the derived family Thalassematidae, allied to the speciose genus Ochetostoma. These details include proboscis morphology, anterior setae, and muscle organisation within the trunk. An additional specimen is described in open nomenclature, as it may be either a distinct species, or a juvenile of Llwygarua suzannae gen. et sp. nov. with a relatively elongated proboscis. These worms demonstrate a very early and previously unrecognised diversification of the echiuran grown group, further supporting an early diversification of Annelida as a whole.

N. Klein, P. M. Sander, J. Liu et al.

Abstract Here, we present the first bone histological and microanatomical study of thalattosaurians, an enigmatic group among Triassic marine reptiles. Two taxa of thalattosaurians, the askeptosauroid Askeptosaurus italicus and one as yet undescribed thalattosauroid, are examined. Both taxa have a rather different microanatomy, tissue type, and growth pattern. Askeptosaurus italicus from the late Anisian middle Besano Formation of the southern Alpine Triassic shows very compact tissue in vertebrae, rib, a gastralium, and femora, and all bones are without medullary cavities. The tissue shows moderate to low vascularization, dominated by highly organized and very coarse parallel-fibred bone, resembling interwoven tissue. Vascularization is dominated by simple longitudinal vascular canals, except for the larger femur of Askeptosaurus, where simple vascular canals dominate in a radial arrangement. Growth marks stratify the cortex of femora. The vertebrae and humeri from the undescribed thalattosauroid from the late Carnian of Oregon have primary and secondary cancellous bone, resulting in an overall low bone compactness. Two dorsal vertebral centra show dominantly secondary trabeculae, whereas a caudal vertebral centrum shows much primary trabecular bone, globuli ossei, and cartilage, indicating an earlier ontogenetic stage of the specimens or paedomorphosis. The humeri of the thalattosauroid show large, simple vascular canals that are dominantly radially oriented in a scaffold of woven and loosely organized parallel-fibred tissue. Few of the simple vascular canals are thinly but only incompletely lined by parallel-fibered tissue. In the Oregon material, changes in growth rate are only indicated by changes in vascular organization but no distinct growth marks were identified. The compact bone of Askeptosaurus is best comparable to some pachypleurosaurs, whereas its combination of tissue and vascularity is similar to eosauropterygians in general, except for the coarse nature of its parallel-fibred tissue. The cancellous bone of the Oregon thalattosauroid resembles what is documented in ichthyosaurs and plesiosaurs. However, in contrast to these its tissue does not consist of fibro-lamellar bone type. Tissue types of both thalattosaurian taxa indicate rather different growth rates and growth patterns, associated with different life history strategies. The microanatomy reflects different life styles that fit to the different environments in which they had been found (intraplatform basin vs. open marine). Both thalattosaurian taxa differ from each other but in sum also from all other marine reptile taxa studied so far. Thalattosaurian bone histology documents once more that bone histology provides for certain groups (i.e., Triassic Diapsida) only a poor phylogenetic signal and is more influenced by exogenous factors. Differences in lifestyle, life history traits, and growth rate and pattern enabled all these Triassic marine reptiles to live contemporaneously in the same habitat managing to avoid substantial competition.

Damián Voglino, Jorge D. Carrillo-Briceño, Heinz Furrer et al.

Abstract Santiago Roth was a Swiss fossil finder, naturalist, and paleontologist that emigrated to Argentina in 1866. His work largely influenced the discipline in the country at the end of the twentieth century, particularly the stratigraphy of the Pampean region. Some of his collections of Pampean fossils were sold to museums and private collectors in Europe and were accompanied by elaborated catalogues. Fossils in the Roth’s catalogues N° 2 and 3 are housed today in the Natural History Museum of Denmark, fossils from catalogues N° 4 to 6, were sold to Swiss museums, with Catalogue N° 5 currently housed at the Department of Paleontology, Universität Zürich. Here, we provide a general framework on the stratigraphy from the Roth’s Pampean fossil sites, summarize the history of the Pampean fossils in Europe originally collected by Roth, and provide historical and curatorial details of the Roth’s collection at the Department of Paleontology, Universität Zürich.

Catholijn M. Jonker, Luciano Cavalcante Siebert, Pradeep K. Murukannaiah

With the growing capabilities and pervasiveness of AI systems, societies must collectively choose between reduced human autonomy, endangered democracies and limited human rights, and AI that is aligned to human and social values, nurturing collaboration, resilience, knowledge and ethical behaviour. In this chapter, we introduce the notion of self-reflective AI systems for meaningful human control over AI systems. Focusing on decision support systems, we propose a framework that integrates knowledge from psychology and philosophy with formal reasoning methods and machine learning approaches to create AI systems responsive to human values and social norms. We also propose a possible research approach to design and develop self-reflective capability in AI systems. Finally, we argue that self-reflective AI systems can lead to self-reflective hybrid systems (human + AI), thus increasing meaningful human control and empowering human moral reasoning by providing comprehensible information and insights on possible human moral blind spots.

Xiao-Yi Yu, Lianpeng Sun, Xinzhe Zhu et al.

We investigated the distribution, sources, and ecological risks of heavy metals (As, Hg, Zn, Cd, Pb, Cu, and Cr) in seawater, sediments, and shellfish in the inner and outer waters of Daya Bay. 42 seawater quality survey sites, 21 sediment survey sites and 21 biological survey sites were set up in the study area. Our results showed that Daya Bay’s seawater is both clean and has a high Cu exceedance factor. The sediment heavy metal potential ecological hazard indices are all less than 40, which indicates a minimal degree of risk. ERI in the bay (mean value of ERI is 25.43) and that outside the bay (mean value of 23.56) is lower than 150, so the potential impact on the ecosystem is relatively low. In the Bay, Hg and Zn are primarily from fossil fuel and coal combustion, which enter the ocean via dry and wet deposition or surface runoff. Outside the Bay, Cr, Cu, Zn and Pb are derived the combustion waste gases of ships that enter the ocean via atmospheric deposition. Concerningly, arsenic and lead level in shellfish organisms appear to be above the standard values.However, because THQ and TTHQ are less than 1, there is no potential risk to human health. The weekly assessed intakes (EWIs) of Hg, AS, Pb, and Cd in shellfish inside and outside Daya Bay were 0.093 (0.058 outside the Bay), 0.594 (0.534), 1.115 (1.489), and 0.201 (0.190), respectively, all of these values were lower than the provisional PTWI for humans established by WHO. This indicates that the probability of carcinogenic risk to the population from heavy metals in shellfish are all below unacceptable levels.

TONY HARPER, CALEB F. ADKINS, GUILLERMO W. ROUGIER

The large, bunodont, mammal Peligrotherium tropicalis is an enigmatic member of the earliest Paleocene fauna of Punta Peligro, Argentina. While being a contemporary of many of the earliest large-bodied “archaic ungulates” in the Northern Hemisphere, P. tropicalis is a remnant of an endemic Mesozoic non-therian lineage. The interpretation of P. tropicalis as an omnivore/herbivore has therefore been difficult to evaluate, given its phylogenetic placement outside of the therian clade, and lack of many of the molar characteristics thought to be essential for the forms of mastication seen in marsupials and placentals. Here we present a three-dimensional generalization of the classical “bifulcral” biomechanical model of bite force and joint force estimation, which is capable of accommodating the wide range of mediolateral force orientations generated by the muscles of mastication, as estimated by the geometry of their rigid attachment surfaces. Using this analysis, we demonstrate that P. tropicalis is more herbivorously adapted (viz. shows a greater Group 2 relative to Group 1 jaw adductor advantage for producing postcanine orthal bite forces) than even the hypocarnivorous carnivorans Procyon lotor and Ursus arctos, and is similar to the ungulates Sus scrofa and Diceros bicornis. This similarity also extends to the mediolateral distribution of relative muscle group advantage, with Group 1 muscles (responsible for effecting the initial adduction of the working-side hemimandible into centric occlusion) having greater orthal bite forces labially; and Group 2 muscles (those responsible for producing occlusal grinding motions) being more powerful lingually. Finally, we show that P. tropicalis preserves relatively little of its orthal bite force magnitude at high gape, suggesting that large-object durophagy would not have been a likely feeding strategy.

Jediah R. Clark, Mohammad Naiseh, Joel Fischer et al.

In the domain of unmanned vehicles, autonomous robotic swarms promise to deliver increased efficiency and collective autonomy. How these swarms will operate in the future, and what communication requirements and operational boundaries will arise are yet to be sufficiently defined. A workshop was conducted with 11 professional unmanned-vehicle operators and designers with the objective of identifying use-cases for developing and testing robotic swarms. Three scenarios were defined by experts and were then compiled to produce a single use case outlining the scenario, objectives, agents, communication requirements and stages of operation when collaborating with highly autonomous swarms. Our compiled use case is intended for researchers, designers, and manufacturers alike to test and tailor their design pipeline to accommodate for some of the key issues in human-swarm ininteraction. Examples of application include informing simulation development, forming the basis of further design workshops, and identifying trust issues that may arise between human operators and the swarm.

Sean McGregor

Emerging artificial intelligence (AI) applications often balance the preferences and impacts among diverse and contentious stakeholder groups. Accommodating these stakeholder groups during system design, development, and deployment requires tools for the elicitation of disparate system interests and collaboration interfaces supporting negotiation balancing those interests. This paper introduces interactive visual "participation interfaces" for Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) and collaborative ranking problems as examples restoring a human-centered locus of control.