Hasil untuk "Natural history (General)"

Ce Zhou, Qian Li, Chen Li et al.

Pretrained Foundation Models (PFMs) are regarded as the foundation for various downstream tasks with different data modalities. A PFM (e.g., BERT, ChatGPT, and GPT-4) is trained on large-scale data which provides a reasonable parameter initialization for a wide range of downstream applications. BERT learns bidirectional encoder representations from Transformers, which are trained on large datasets as contextual language models. Similarly, the generative pretrained transformer (GPT) method employs Transformers as the feature extractor and is trained using an autoregressive paradigm on large datasets. Recently, ChatGPT shows promising success on large language models, which applies an autoregressive language model with zero shot or few shot prompting. The remarkable achievements of PFM have brought significant breakthroughs to various fields of AI. Numerous studies have proposed different methods, raising the demand for an updated survey. This study provides a comprehensive review of recent research advancements, challenges, and opportunities for PFMs in text, image, graph, as well as other data modalities. The review covers the basic components and existing pretraining methods used in natural language processing, computer vision, and graph learning. Additionally, it explores advanced PFMs used for different data modalities and unified PFMs that consider data quality and quantity. The review also discusses research related to the fundamentals of PFMs, such as model efficiency and compression, security, and privacy. Finally, the study provides key implications, future research directions, challenges, and open problems in the field of PFMs. Overall, this survey aims to shed light on the research of the PFMs on scalability, security, logical reasoning ability, cross-domain learning ability, and the user-friendly interactive ability for artificial general intelligence.

S. Sharkey, D. Windenburg, John R. Lesser et al.

T. Liang, B. Rehermann, L. Seeff et al.

A. Feldstein, P. Charatcharoenwitthaya, S. Treeprasertsuk et al.

Objectives: The long-term prognosis of non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) in children remains uncertain. We aimed at determining the long-term outcomes and survival of children with NAFLD. Design: Retrospective longitudinal hospital-based cohort study. Patients: Sixty-six children with NAFLD (mean age 13.9 (SD 3.9) years) were followed up for up to 20 years with a total of 409.6 person-years of follow-up. Results: The metabolic syndrome was present in 19 (29%) children at the time of NAFLD diagnosis with 55 (83%) presenting with at least one feature of the metabolic syndrome including obesity, hypertension, dyslipidaemia and/or hyperglycaemia. Four children with baseline normal fasting glucose developed type 2 diabetes 4–11 years after NAFLD diagnosis. A total of 13 liver biopsies were obtained from five patients over a mean of 41.4 (SD 28.8) months showing progression of fibrosis stage in four children. During follow-up, two children died and two underwent liver transplantation for decompensated cirrhosis. The observed survival free of liver transplantation was significantly shorter in the NAFLD cohort as compared to the expected survival in the general United States population of the same age and sex (log-rank test, p<0.00001), with a standardised mortality ratio of 13.6 (95% confidence interval, 3.8 to 34.8). NAFLD recurred in the allograft in the two cases transplanted, with one patient progressing to cirrhosis and requiring re-transplantation. Conclusions: Children with NAFLD may develop end-stage liver disease with the consequent need for liver transplantation. NAFLD in children seen in a tertiary care centre may be associated with a significantly shorter survival as compared to the general population.

Aleksandra Krasilnikova, Michele Di Iorio, Emanuele Antenucci et al.

The current study aimed to compare the effects of decreasing osmolality in glucose-based extenders containing methanol alone versus a methanol-ethylene glycol combination on the post-thaw motility of Mediterranean brown trout (Salmo cettii) spermatozoa. Milt was collected from mature males in the Biferno River, Southern Italy, and cryopreserved using a control cryomedium (150 mM glucose with 7.5% methanol) and experimental variants with reduced glucose (100 mM, 50 mM) paired with methanol alone or combined with 2.5% ethylene glycol. Samples were cryopreserved in 0.25 mL straws with a final sperm concentration of 3.0 × 109 spermatozoa/mL, corresponding to 750 × 106 spermatozoa/straw. Sperm motility and kinematic parameters of Mediterranean brown trout were assessed for fresh sperm and post-thaw samples cryopreserved in various cryomedia. Fresh sperm exhibited robust motility (89.0 ± 8.4%) and curvilinear velocity (VCL, 121.2 ± 22.4 µm/s), while the control cryomedium preserved motility at 65.9 ± 12.9% and VCL at 117.6 ± 26.1 µm/s; the experimental 100 mM glucose with 7.5% methanol and 2.5% ethylene glycol treatment yielded comparable motility (65.6 ± 11.6%) but reduced VCL (81.5 ± 16.1 µm/s, p &lt; 0.05). Other treatments showed diminished efficacy, particularly at 50 mM glucose. These findings reveal that a hypotonic extender with methanol-ethylene glycol synergy sustains motility after cryopreservation despite lower glucose levels, demonstrating that the osmotic threshold of extender can be lowered to 100 mOsm/kg without compromising salmonid sperm function. This approach offers a practical tool for conserving S. cettii, supporting broader restoration efforts amid escalating environmental pressures.

Jingyang Ke, Feiyang Wu, Jiyi Wang et al.

Traditional approaches to studying decision-making in neuroscience focus on simplified behavioral tasks where animals perform repetitive, stereotyped actions to receive explicit rewards. While informative, these methods constrain our understanding of decision-making to short timescale behaviors driven by explicit goals. In natural environments, animals exhibit more complex, long-term behaviors driven by intrinsic motivations that are often unobservable. Recent works in time-varying inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) aim to capture shifting motivations in long-term, freely moving behaviors. However, a crucial challenge remains: animals make decisions based on their history, not just their current state. To address this, we introduce SWIRL (SWitching IRL), a novel framework that extends traditional IRL by incorporating time-varying, history-dependent reward functions. SWIRL models long behavioral sequences as transitions between short-term decision-making processes, each governed by a unique reward function. SWIRL incorporates biologically plausible history dependency to capture how past decisions and environmental contexts shape behavior, offering a more accurate description of animal decision-making. We apply SWIRL to simulated and real-world animal behavior datasets and show that it outperforms models lacking history dependency, both quantitatively and qualitatively. This work presents the first IRL model to incorporate history-dependent policies and rewards to advance our understanding of complex, naturalistic decision-making in animals.

Jibang Wu, Chenghao Yang, Yi Wu et al.

This paper develops an agentic framework that employs large language models (LLMs) for grounded persuasive language generation in automated copywriting, with real estate marketing as a focal application. Our method is designed to align the generated content with user preferences while highlighting useful factual attributes. This agent consists of three key modules: (1) Grounding Module, mimicking expert human behavior to predict marketable features; (2) Personalization Module, aligning content with user preferences; (3) Marketing Module, ensuring factual accuracy and the inclusion of localized features. We conduct systematic human-subject experiments in the domain of real estate marketing, with a focus group of potential house buyers. The results demonstrate that marketing descriptions generated by our approach are preferred over those written by human experts by a clear margin while maintaining the same level of factual accuracy. Our findings suggest a promising agentic approach to automate large-scale targeted copywriting while ensuring factuality of content generation.

Nina Gural-Sverlova, Roman Gural

Background. Due to global climate changes, a number of land mollusc species, previously known only from southern Ukraine or only from Crimea, are increasingly being recorded in different parts of the country. Apparently, not only species of the Crimean origin but also some other molluscs, native or alien to the Crimean Peninsula, could have been introduced from Crimea in different time periods. Therefore, the main purpose of this study was to generalise and give a critical analysis of data on the present distribution in Ukraine outside Crimea for 8 such species, whose primary source of dispersal could be, at least partially, the Crimean Peninsula. Materials and Methods. We used the results of our own long-term (from 1994 to 2023) research of the land mollusc fauna in different parts of Ukraine, examined collections of other researchers and amateurs, numerous stock materials of the State Museum of Natural History in Lviv, analysed a number of literature sources from the beginning of the 20th century to the present day, as well as reports from two citizen science databases (iNaturalist and UkrBIN). Results and Discussion. We have sequentially analysed the available data about the present distribution and chronology of discovery in different administrative regions of Ukraine outside Crimea for Cecilioides raddei, Phenacolimax annularis, Oxychilus deilus, Xeropicta derbentina, X. krynickii, Monacha cartusiana, Eobania vermiculata, as well as Helix lucorum with the shell colouration characteristic of the mountainous Crimea. It has been established that one or more species have now been reliably recorded in all parts and almost all administrative regions of Ukraine, with the exception of Sumy and Kirovohrad ones. Conclusion. The conducted analysis confirms the potential influence of Crimea on the formation of the present species composition of alien land molluscs not only in the south, but also in other parts of Ukraine. Most of the analyzed species are so far known only from those administrative regions that border the Black and Azov Seas. Two species, X. derbentina and M. cartusiana, are now rather widespread in Ukraine, but most of their known records were made no earlier than 1990s. The data systematized in this study can become the basis for monitoring the further spread of the species under study into different parts of Ukraine, which may become especially relevant in the post-war period.

Massimo Giovannini

The timeline of the expansion rate ultimately defines the interplay between high energy physics, astrophysics and cosmology. The guiding theme of this topical review is provided by the scrutiny of the early history of the space-time curvature through the diffuse backgrounds of gravitational radiation that are sensitive to all the stages of the evolution of the plasma. Due to their broad spectrum (extending from the aHz region to the THz domain) they bridge the macroworld described by general relativity and the microworld of the fundamental constituents of matter. It is argued that during the next score year the analysis of the relic gravitons may infirm or confirm the current paradigm where a radiation plasma is assumed to dominate the whole post-inflationary epoch. The role of high frequency and ultra-high frequency signals between the MHz and the THz is emphasized in the perspective of quantum sensing. The multiparticle final state of the relic gravitons and its macroscopic quantumness is also discussed with particular attention to the interplay between the entanglement entropy and the maximal frequency of the spectrum.

Pavel M. Shukov

The article presents current results of a study of Short-Toed Eagle (Circaetus gallicus) distribution, abundance, and ecology in Nizhny Novgorod region. We designed a network of auto routes to survey the area and subsequently covered it in a four-wheel drive vehicle combined with walking through upland bogs and forest margins by foot. Observations were carried out in 30 districts of the region. Hunting Short-Toed Eagles were observed from natural hills through binoculars. Nests were detected based on adult birds’ observations and analysis of satellite images of the surveyed areas. Photo and video recording of birds and nests was carried out using a SLR camera and a quadcopter. In 2015–2023 observations were carried out on 49 breeding territories.

Munazza Zaib, Wei Emma Zhang, Quan Z. Sheng et al.

The increasing demand for the web-based digital assistants has given a rapid rise in the interest of the Information Retrieval (IR) community towards the field of conversational question answering (ConvQA). However, one of the critical aspects of ConvQA is the effective selection of conversational history turns to answer the question at hand. The dependency between relevant history selection and correct answer prediction is an intriguing but under-explored area. The selected relevant context can better guide the system so as to where exactly in the passage to look for an answer. Irrelevant context, on the other hand, brings noise to the system, thereby resulting in a decline in the model's performance. In this paper, we propose a framework, DHS-ConvQA (Dynamic History Selection in Conversational Question Answering), that first generates the context and question entities for all the history turns, which are then pruned on the basis of similarity they share in common with the question at hand. We also propose an attention-based mechanism to re-rank the pruned terms based on their calculated weights of how useful they are in answering the question. In the end, we further aid the model by highlighting the terms in the re-ranked conversational history using a binary classification task and keeping the useful terms (predicted as 1) and ignoring the irrelevant terms (predicted as 0). We demonstrate the efficacy of our proposed framework with extensive experimental results on CANARD and QuAC -- the two popularly utilized datasets in ConvQA. We demonstrate that selecting relevant turns works better than rewriting the original question. We also investigate how adding the irrelevant history turns negatively impacts the model's performance and discuss the research challenges that demand more attention from the IR community.

Rachel A. Farrow, Helen E. Roy, Peter M. J. Brown

The invasive alien species Harmonia axyridis (Coleoptera: Coccinellidae) was first observed in the UK in 2004. Previous studies have demonstrated the adverse effects on other species of H. axyridis during its early stages of establishment. However, habitat factors are important in determining distribution and population trends of ladybirds. Whilst the abundance of H. axyridis is well known in the UK within urban and other managed habitats, much less is known about its abundance in the wider countryside. Here we present the results of surveys from rural woodland habitats to assess whether or not H. axyridis dominates coccinellid communities in these rural habitats. Additionally, we explored the relationship between coccinellid and aphid abundance within these habitats. All field sites were in Cambridgeshire or Suffolk, East Anglia, UK and were surveyed between May and October 2016 and 2017. Three deciduous sites and three coniferous sites were included in the study. Surveys were conducted using a standardised approach involving sweep-netting within grass margins and tree beating to sample ladybirds from trees. Three distinct vegetation structures or layers were surveyed within both the coniferous and deciduous sites; tree, shrub and herb layer. All captured coccinellids were identified to species-level. Seventeen species of coccinellid and over 1300 individuals were recorded during the study period from two distinct site types (deciduous, coniferous). Species richness was lower at deciduous sites (n = 12) in comparison to coniferous (n = 16) sites. The coccinellid community also did not appear to be dominated by H. axyridis at rural sites, in contrast to urban areas. Deciduous woodland appeared to be a lesser preferred habitat of H. axyridis than coniferous woodland. Additionally, there was a distinct difference in the coccinellid community in relation to vegetation structure (across the tree, shrub and herb layers) between coniferous and deciduous sites. Our results indicate that there appear to be distinct native coccinellid communities at deciduous and coniferous sites. We discuss the way in which rural woodlands could act as a refuge for some native coccinellids.

Federico Pinna, Annalisa Caragnano, Annalisa Caragnano et al.

Understanding how coralline algae may acclimatize to ocean warming is important to understand their survival over the coming century. Taking advantage of natural differences in temperature conditions between coastal areas in Sardinia (Italy) and between depths, the responses in terms of biological traits to warming of the crustose coralline alga Lithophyllum stictiforme, a key bioconstructor of coralligenous reefs in the Mediterranean, were evaluated in the field by two innovative transplant experiments where translocated specimens were used as controls. Results of the first experiment (algae cross transplanted between a cold and a warm site at two depths, 23 and 34 m) showed that the marginal growth of the alga and production of conceptacles were higher in the cold site, regardless of the treatment (transplant and translocation) and depth. However, growth in thickness in algae transferred from the cold to the warm site was higher at 34 m of depth, where they had a better performance than the local (translocated) algae. Results of the second experiment (algae transplanted from 34 m to 15 m of depth under different light irradiance manipulations) evidenced that the increase in temperature of +4°C was tolerated by thalli transplanted at 15 m, but that thallus growth and conceptacles production was negatively affected by the higher light irradiance. These results suggest an overall good adaptability of L. stictiforme under warmer conditions, even those due to thermocline deepening. Overall, these results encourage consideration of the use of transplants of this bioconstructor in future restoration actions of coralligenous habitats.

R. Calderón, B. L'Huillier, D. Polarski et al.

Combining Supernovae, Baryon Acoustic Oscillations and Redshift-Space Distortions data from the next generation of (Stage-IV) cosmological surveys, we aim to reconstruct the expansion history up to large redshifts using forward-modeling of $f_{\mathrm DE}(z) = ρ_\mathrm{DE}(z)/ρ_\mathrm{DE,0}$ with Gaussian processes (GP). In order to reconstruct cosmological quantities at high redshifts where few or no data are available, we adopt a new approach to GP which enforces the following minimal assumptions: a) Our cosmology corresponds to a flat Friedman-Lemaître-Robertson-Walker (FLRW) universe; b) An Einstein de Sitter (EdS) universe is obtained on large redshifts. This allows us to reconstruct the perturbations growth history from the reconstructed background expansion history. Assuming various DE models, we show the ability of our reconstruction method to differentiate them from $Λ$CDM at $\gtrsim2σ$.

Zeerak Talat, Anne Lauscher

Machine learning and NLP require the construction of datasets to train and fine-tune models. In this context, previous work has demonstrated the sensitivity of these data sets. For instance, potential societal biases in this data are likely to be encoded and to be amplified in the models we deploy. In this work, we draw from developments in the field of history and take a novel perspective on these problems: considering datasets and models through the lens of historical fiction surfaces their political nature, and affords re-configuring how we view the past, such that marginalized discourses are surfaced. Building on such insights, we argue that contemporary methods for machine learning are prejudiced towards dominant and hegemonic histories. Employing the example of neopronouns, we show that by surfacing marginalized histories within contemporary conditions, we can create models that better represent the lived realities of traditionally marginalized and excluded communities.

Bhargav Kumar Kakumani, Suman Prabha Yadav

In this article, we consider a viscoelastic plate equation with past history, nonlinear damping, and logarithmic nonlinearity. We prove explicit and general decay rate results of the solution to the viscoelastic plate equation with past history. Convex properties, logarithmic inequalities, and generalised Young's inequality are mainly used to prove the decay estimate.

William M. Twardek, Elizabeth A. Nyboer, David Tickner et al.

Abstract Freshwater biodiversity loss is one of the greatest environmental threats in our changing world. Although declines have been reported extensively in the literature, much less attention has been devoted to solving the freshwater biodiversity crisis relative to other ecosystems. The recently proposed Emergency Recovery Plan for Freshwater Biodiversity (Tickner et al., 2020, BioScience, 70(4), 330–342) outlines an ambitious but necessary set of overarching actions that can help “bend the curve” for freshwater biodiversity declines. This plan is timely given the present opportunity to adjust freshwater biodiversity targets in international biodiversity agreements and to encourage meeting targets of relevant Sustainable Development Goals. Yet, relying solely on a trickle down from such agreements to national and local scales will likely take too long, given the immediate urgency of the situation. Here, we advocate for a broader, concerted effort from all actors to ensure the Emergency Recovery Plan meaningfully influences the actions of practitioners at a local scale. We outline the roles and responsibilities of actors involved with policy, research, professional bodies and societies, advocacy, and industry, as well as practitioners themselves, in achieving this goal. It is our hope that this overview facilitates the real‐world actions needed to execute the Emergency Recovery Plan so that we can indeed “bend the curve” for freshwater biodiversity.

Md Salauddin Palash, PhD, Md Ruhul Amin, Md Yousuf Ali, PhD et al.

Since and prior to the initialization of civilizations, humankind hunted and gathered while plants and herbs were the mainstays of treatment. Like many other countries, in many rural and tribal areas of Bangladesh, people relied on nature and natural remedies to heal and prevent diseases due to the immense abundance of medicinal plants. Nonetheless, these medicinal plants are also a great source of income generation, employment creation, entrepreneurship. This study concentrated on the marketing system and value addition process by understanding market actor's performance through the efficiency of the supply chain nodes in the medicinal plants business. The constraints and possible remedies were illustrated with SWOT (Strength, Weakness, Opportunity, and Threat) analysis to depict the medicinal plants' business environment. Seed suppliers were the highest value-adding actor for Tulsi (Ocimum tenuiflorum), while processors were the least value creator for Basok (Justicia adhatoda). On the other hand, lack of modern production and business techniques, financial backwardness of medicinal plant farmers, minimum or no training and extension support, unstable market price, and demand hinders the full marketing system of medicinal plants. Land suitability, input abundancy, and history of acceptance are major strengths of the medicinal plant business, while minimum support, government non-responsiveness, calamitic hazards, and poor quality inputs pose potential threats to this enterprise. However, with appropriate planning and development of a suitable environment for medicinal plant production, processing, and marketing, this sector may flourish in the long run.

Tin Nguyen, A. Thompson, S. Bowden et al.

Philip Dwyer, Joy Damousi