Hasil untuk "Natural history (General)"

Geraldo Willson Fernandes, Gabriel Arvelino de Paula, Mariana G. Bender et al.

Brazil’s General Environmental Licensing Law (No. 15,190/2025) redefines environmental governance under the banner of “simplification” but effectively dismantles preventive safeguards. The law introduces self-declared licensing, automatic license renewals, and broad exemptions for agriculture and livestock, while restricting public participation. Although partial presidential vetoes removed some unconstitutional provisions, these vetoes may still be overturned by Congress. Key omissions, such as the absence of vetoes on Articles 7 and 9, preserve mechanisms that weaken oversight and accountability. Within Brazil’s decentralized system, where most authorizations are issued by state agencies, the law consolidates existing permissive practices and deepens regulatory asymmetry. This new framework lowers the national baseline for environmental protection, threatens biodiversity, and jeopardizes Brazil’s ability to meet international climate and biodiversity commitments. Instead of modernizing procedures or strengthening institutional capacity, the law normalizes shortcuts that externalize environmental costs and undermine democratic participation.

Alberto Olivares-Alarcos, Muhammad Ahsan, Satrio Sanjaya et al.

Building effective human-robot interaction requires robots to derive conclusions from their experiences that are both logically sound and communicated in ways aligned with human expectations. This paper presents a hybrid framework that blends ontology-based reasoning with large language models (LLMs) to produce semantically grounded and natural robot explanations. Ontologies ensure logical consistency and domain grounding, while LLMs provide fluent, context-aware and adaptive language generation. The proposed method grounds data from human-robot experiences, enabling robots to reason about whether events are typical or atypical based on their properties. We integrate a state-of-the-art algorithm for retrieving and constructing static contrastive ontology-based narratives with an LLM agent that uses them to produce concise, clear, interactive explanations. The approach is validated through a laboratory study replicating an industrial collaborative task. Empirical results show significant improvements in the clarity and brevity of ontology-based narratives while preserving their semantic accuracy. Initial evaluations further demonstrate the system's ability to adapt explanations to user feedback. Overall, this work highlights the potential of ontology-LLM integration to advance explainable agency, and promote more transparent human-robot collaboration.

Yu-Ying Chen, Qiu-Ping Liu, P. An et al.

BACKGROUND Neurological diseases seriously affect human health, which are arousing wider attention, and it is a great challenge to discover neuroprotective drugs with minimal side-effects and better efficacies. Natural agents derived from herbs or plants have become unparalleled resources for the discovery of novel drug candidates. Panax ginseng C. A. Meyer, a well-known herbal medicine in China, occupies a very important position in traditional Chinese medicines (TCMs) with a long history of clinical application. Ginsenoside Rd is the active compound in P. ginseng known to have broad-spectrum pharmacological effects to reduce neurological damage that can lead to neurological diseases, including Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease, Huntington's disease, depression, cognitive impairment, and cerebral ischemia. PURPOSE To review and discuss the effects and mechanisms of ginsenoside Rd in the treatment of neurological diseases. STUDY DESIGN & METHODS The related information was compiled by the major scientific databases, such as Chinese National Knowledge Infrastructure (CNKI), Elsevier, ScienceDirect, PubMed, SpringerLink, Web of Science, and GeenMedical. Using 'Ginsenoside Rd', 'Ginsenosides', 'Anti-inflammation', 'Antioxidant', 'Apoptosis' and 'Neuroprotection' as keywords, the correlated literature was extracted and conducted from the databases mentioned above. RESULTS Through summarizing the existing research progress, we found that the general effects of ginsenoside Rd are anti-inflammatory, antioxidant, anti-apoptosis, inhibition of Ca2+ influx and protection of mitochondria, and through these pathways, the compound can inhibit excitatory toxicity, regulate nerve growth factor, and promote nerve regeneration. CONCLUSION Ginsenoside Rd is a promising natural neuroprotective agent. This review would contribute to the future development of ginsenoside Rd as a novel clinical candidate drug for treating neurological diseases.

Ariane Moulinec, Selma de Donnová, Jindřiška Bojková et al.

Stream restoration constitutes a tool to mitigate hydro-morphological degradation, which affects a substantial proportion of European streams and rivers. However, improvement of local habitat quality does not always result in the recovery of macroinvertebrate assemblages, mostly due to persisting catchment-scale stressors or colonization constraints. In this study, we aimed to explore the effect of pollution pressure on selected biotic indices in restored sites, and the role of hydro-morphological quality of upstream reference sites on macroinvertebrate colonization. We utilized a paired comparison design and included 24 streams restored before up to 32 years. Using linear regression models, we tested the effect of factors such as water chemistry, land use, hydro-morphological parameters, distance between restored and reference sites, and time since restoration on diversity in restored streams. Alpha diversity parameters at both restored and reference sites displayed comparable biotic trends along all tested predictors, with water chemistry being the strongest predictor. This was also the case for beta diversity parameters, but here, interestingly, streams with higher pollution pressure exhibited higher dissimilarity between restored and reference sites. This dissimilarity was governed by turnover, indicating that restoration resulted in greater assemblage change in polluted streams. This suggests that restoration may, to an extent, increase diversity even in disturbed agricultural landscapes. However, we did not confirm the role of hydro-morphological quality of upstream reference site on macroinvertebrate colonization. Large-scale factors such as water chemistry and land use play a pivotal role in structuring macroinvertebrate assemblages.

E. I. Kashirskaya, V. N. Kuzmin, N. P. Provatar et al.

Background. The most important achievement in modern medicine is the widespread introduction of assisted reproductive technologies. In Russia, in vitro fertilization has acquired well-known advantages. The use of this method made it possible to solve the problem of infertility for a large number of families and satisfy a woman’s natural need for motherhood. At the same time, the ultimate goal – the appearance of healthy offspring – can only be achieved through the joint efforts of reproductive specialists: clinical and laboratory specialists. The justified purpose of this study was to determine the most significant indicators of the health of newborns in Astrakhan after in vitro fertilization in relation to indicators of maternal health.Materials and methods. The health indicators and developmental characteristics of 109 children born after in vitro fertilization in the city of Astrakhan and the Astrakhan region on the period 2017-2022, as well as the morbidity of their mothers, were studied. Methods of clinical and laboratory examination and modern methods of statistical analysis were used.Results. It has been established that multiple pregnancies after in vitro fertilization are more often observed in women who have a history of a greater number of various pathological conditions, mainly anemia of pregnancy, endocrine diseases accompanied by edematous syndrome and obesity, as well as virus carriage against the background of multiple attempts at fertilization. A certain number of newborns after in vitro fertilization (12.4% from singleton and 18.4% from multiple pregnancies) had somatic pathology, which was accompanied by iron deficiency anemia. However, the relationship between the number of fetuses in pregnancy after in vitro fertilization, the sex of the newborn and the occurrence of early anemia in newborns has not been statistically confirmed.

林季怡 Chi-I Lin, 李育諭 Yuh-Yuh Li

本研究探討如何透過食農教育培養大學生生態觀點，特別是拉近人與環境的距離。食農教育，除了永續農業概念的學習，最重要的是營造人與土地的親近關係，人與土地親近關係的認識，是環境倫理人文思維的深層實踐，不易在傳統教室教學環境中傳遞。本研究參考後實證教學方式，規劃小農場實作，作為永續農業概念教學的主要場域。教學理念為透過提供 學生農業耕作知識內容及經驗脈絡，並適當維持學生正向愉悅的學習感覺，從而產生對土地之親近感。本研究探討除了永續農業概念的學習，校園農場作為食農教育教案是否可以，以及如何可以讓學生產生土地親近感，並以概念圖及開放式意見調查進行資料蒐集，針對111位學生在學期初與學期末進行永續農業概念圖評量及開放式意見調查。主要研究發現包括：一、透過概念圖分析，學生對永續農業的概念在學期末測驗分數是提高的，且在環境或是經濟面向分數會較社會面向分數高；二、學生土地親近感在學期末測量分數相較於學期初提高，土地親近感之改變顯示食農教育課程有助於永續農業概念之學習；三、概念圖作為永續農業概念測量方法，具有不錯的效度。本研究建議，未來食農教育可規劃校園農場作為提供知識文化刺激的場域，增加學生與真實農業問題互動的機會與動機。 In the Global Education 2030 Agenda, United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO, 2017) emphasized that addressing the imbalance between humans and nature and promoting sustainable agriculture to end hunger and ensure food security are among the most essential educational goals. Community-based agriculture can be a key driver of change (UNESCO, 2017). On April 22, 2015, the Japanese government began promoting food and agriculture education and established the Basic Act on the Promotion of Urban Agriculture. One of the proposed strategies in this act is to “start from education and establish roots.” Similarly, on April 19, 2022, Taiwan established the Food and Agriculture Education Act, which was promulgated on May 4, 2022. According to Article 1 of the Food and Agriculture Education Act, the goals of food and agriculture education are to promote nationwide food and agriculture education; strengthen the link between diet, environment, and agriculture; enhance national health; inherit and promote a culture of food and agricultural; promote sustainable development of rural areas, agriculture, and the environment; establish a sound national food and agriculture education system; and cultivate talent. The fundamental goal of food and agriculture education is to strengthen the connection between diet, environment, and agriculture. One strategy to achieve this goal is to focus on strengthening the connection between humans and nature. The relationship between humans and the environment has not received considerable attention from scholars in the fields of the social sciences and humanities. However, scholars have begun to shift their focus toward the interaction between humans and the environment. Aldo Leopold, regarded as the father of environmental ethics, was the first scholar in the Western world to consider the relationship between humans and the environment. He introduced the concept of land ethics as a means of evaluating how humans should relate to their environment. According to Aldo Leopold’s land ethics, humans are members of a biotic community and must maintain the integrity of the land. Leopold emphasized the importance of the land, arguing that it is not merely a resource for human use but rather a mutually interdependent ecological community. Expanding on these reflections regarding humanity, Zalasiewicz et al. (2010) observed that human history has transitioned from the Holocene epoch to the Anthropocene epoch, a transition that began in approximately 1750. Consequently, humans have become the primary agents shaping the Earth’s environment. The challenge of the Anthropocene epoch, however, lies in the growing alienation between humans and the land, which has led to humans altering the natural environment and has posed a threat to the sustainable existence of human society. Seeking to understand the kinship between humans and the land represents a humanistic approach to environmental ethics. Such an approach can be challenging to employ in traditional classroom settings to achieve target learning outcomes. In the present study, we investigated how agrifood education can foster an ecological perspective in university students that strengthens the connection between humans and the environment. In addition to imparting the principles of sustainable agriculture, a key objective of agrifood education is cultivating a sense of kinship with the land. Our primary research question was as follows: Beyond the acquisition of knowledge regarding sustainable agriculture, how and to what extent does the integration of information regarding small-scale farming practices into agrifood curricula enhance students’ sense of kinship with the land? In accordance with postpositivist approaches, we adopted a sustainability transdisciplinary education model as a teaching strategy and established a small campus farm. This small campus farm was established to facilitate on-site learning regarding sustainable agriculture and related practices. By directly involving students in the farming experience, we sought to create a positive and enjoyable learning environment and foster a deep connection with the land. The campus farm served as a platform for integrating interdisciplinary knowledge regarding agrifood. Situated within the university campus, it combined the elements of the land, natural vitality, and a communal space. It enabled the students to understand the importance of preserving the natural environment and enhanced their understanding of the inherent and interconnected relationships between individuals and society as well as between individuals and the environment. We used concept mapping and open-ended questions to gather research data at the beginning and end of a semester, and we analyzed data obtained from 111 undergraduate students. Concept maps were used to evaluate the students’ understanding of sustainable agricultural development. Subsequently, these concept maps were independently evaluated by two experts on the basis of predetermined criteria, and the interrater reliability was determined. To measure the students’ sense of connection to the land, an open-ended survey was conducted, and the textual content of the students’ responses was analyzed. This survey was conducted at two time points: at the beginning of the study and at the end of the study. The first part involved a thematic apperception test similar to that used in psychology, in which the students were presented with an image of a piece of land and asked to record their thoughts and associations with the image. In the second part, students were presented with open-ended questions through which they were asked to express their ideas regarding different agricultural cultivation methods. The research participants primarily comprised university students enrolled in a two-semester general education course on food and agriculture. These students were affiliated with various colleges within the university, including the College of Science, College of Engineering, College of Marine Sciences, College of Management, College of Social Sciences, and College of the Humanities and Arts. Most of the students had only a basic understanding of agriculture, with a few having a family background in farming. Male students accounted for 57.7% of the participants, and female students accounted for 42.3%. The distribution among academic years was as follows: 25.2% freshmen, 36.9% sophomores, 2.7% juniors, and 35.5% seniors. Our results indicated the following. First, by the end of the course, the students’ understanding of and their attitude toward sustainable agriculture considerably improved. Second, the students’ sense of kinship with the land substantially improved. Third, the change in the students’ attitudes toward sustainable agriculture and their sense of kinship with the land correlated with their on-site campus farming experience. Fourth, concept mapping is an effective tool for evaluating students’ understanding of sustainable agriculture. Overall, our findings provide key empirical insights into the planning and execution of current agrifood educational practices. The humanistic perspective inherent to the concept of kinship with the land is fundamental for the successful implementation of sustainable agriculture education. However, spatial accessibility must be considered when establishing a farm. Notably, students must have a robust foundation with respect to the concept of sustainability to be able to grasp higher-level sustainability concepts. In addition, sustainable literacy must be developed and enriched through ongoing sustainable education.

Akshilkumar Patel, Brandon LaBarge, Tonya S King et al.

Objectives: Mammary analog secretory carcinoma (MASC) is a classification of salivary gland tumors, recently included within the term secretory carcinoma. Previous descriptions of this diagnosis have largely consisted of case reports and case series with few studies investigating its clinical characteristics as compared to non-MASC tumors. Our objective was to use a large patient database to compare the clinical characteristics of mammary analog secretory carcinoma vs. non-mammary analog secretory carcinoma salivary gland tumors. Methods: The National Cancer Database was queried between September and October 2022 for histological diagnosis of mammary analog secretory carcinoma and non-MASC salivary tumors. Patients diagnosed with mammary analog secretory carcinoma and non-mammary analog secretory carcinoma salivary tumors between the period of 2004 through 2019 were included in this analysis. Various demographic and clinical variables were abstracted from the database and compared using Wilcoxon rank sum and chi-square tests. Survival was compared between cohorts using Cox proportional hazards regression. Results: Overall, compared to non-mammary analog secretory carcinoma diagnoses ( n  = 47668), mammary analog secretory carcinoma tumors ( n  = 384) affected younger individuals, displayed favorable pathologic staging and tumor grade, and were less likely to invade surrounding tissues. Patients with mammary analog secretory carcinoma tumors also received treatment more quickly following diagnosis compared to patients with non-mammary analog secretory carcinoma tumors. The risk of death was 4.3 times greater for non-mammary analog secretory carcinoma diagnoses when adjusted for patient variables (hazard ratio = 4.3, 95% confidence interval [2.37–7.71], p  < 0.001). Conclusions: Clinically, mammary analog secretory carcinoma salivary tumors have a more indolent course compared to other salivary cancers. Additional studies are needed to determine the natural history of this tumor type.

Wangchunshu Zhou, Yuchen Eleanor Jiang, Ethan Wilcox et al.

Large language models generate fluent texts and can follow natural language instructions to solve a wide range of tasks without task-specific training. Nevertheless, it is notoriously difficult to control their generation to satisfy the various constraints required by different applications. In this work, we present InstructCTG, a controlled text generation framework that incorporates different constraints by conditioning on natural language descriptions and demonstrations of the constraints. In particular, we first extract the underlying constraints of natural texts through a combination of off-the-shelf NLP tools and simple heuristics. We then verbalize the constraints into natural language instructions to form weakly supervised training data. By prepending natural language descriptions of the constraints and a few demonstrations, we fine-tune a pre-trained language model to incorporate various types of constraints. Compared to existing search-based or score-based methods, InstructCTG is more flexible to different constraint types and has a much smaller impact on the generation quality and speed because it does not modify the decoding procedure. Additionally, InstructCTG allows the model to adapt to new constraints without re-training through the use of few-shot task generalization and in-context learning abilities of instruction-tuned language models.

Danielle de Brito Silva, Paula Jofré, Patricia B. Tissera et al.

Phylogenetic methods have long been used in biology, and more recently have been extended to other fields - for example, linguistics and technology - to study evolutionary histories. Galaxies also have an evolutionary history, and fall within this broad phylogenetic framework. Under the hypothesis that chemical abundances can be used as a proxy for interstellar medium's DNA, phylogenetic methods allow us to reconstruct hierarchical similarities and differences among stars - essentially a tree of evolutionary relationships and thus history. In this work, we apply phylogenetic methods to a simulated disc galaxy obtained with a chemo-dynamical code to test the approach. We found that at least 100 stellar particles are required to reliably portray the evolutionary history of a selected stellar population in this simulation, and that the overall evolutionary history is reliably preserved when the typical uncertainties in the chemical abundances are smaller than 0.08 dex. The results show that the shape of the trees are strongly affected by the age-metallicity relation, as well as the star formation history of the galaxy. We found that regions with low star formation rates produce shorter trees than regions with high star formation rates. Our analysis demonstrates that phylogenetic methods can shed light on the process of galaxy evolution.

Lossan Bonde, Severin Dembele

Terrorism has become a worldwide plague with severe consequences for the development of nations. Besides killing innocent people daily and preventing educational activities from taking place, terrorism is also hindering economic growth. Machine Learning (ML) and Natural Language Processing (NLP) can contribute to fighting terrorism by predicting in real-time future terrorist attacks if accurate data is available. This paper is part of a research project that uses text from social networks to extract necessary information to build an adequate dataset for terrorist attack prediction. We collected a set of 3000 social network texts about terrorism in Burkina Faso and used a subset to experiment with existing NLP solutions. The experiment reveals that existing solutions have poor accuracy for location recognition, which our solution resolves. We will extend the solution to extract dates and action information to achieve the project's goal.

Xi-wen Xu, Xi-wen Xu, Zhangfan Chen et al.

Yu Huang, Xiyang Chen, Haoyue Shu et al.

Recently, the prevalence of hypertension has become a global challenge. Therefore, tremendous efforts have been made to identify and purify antihypertensive peptides (AHTPs) from food-derived proteins to aid the discovery of new hypotensive drugs with fewer side effects. In this study, we performed high-throughput prediction of AHTPs based on multi-omics data, providing an overview of AHTPs in the lined seahorse proteins and suggesting their potential application as bioactive agents to lower blood pressure. We identified 14,695 AHTP-derived genes in the lined seahorse, and most of them were supported by transcriptomic evidence, whereas only 495 genes were further detected by proteome sequencing. Among these predicted AHTP-derived genes, the longest titin had the most hits with 104 AHTPs, some of which were clustered in exon 158, 194, and 204. Another AHTP-rich group was in the collagen family, and four AHTP-rich collagens exhibited much higher transcription in the pouch than in other examined tissues, including brain, testis, and embryos. Additionally, antihypertensive triplets, comprised of the permutations of Gly, Pro, and Lys, prevailed in all collagen sequences due to the representative XaaYaaGly repeat units. In summary, our present findings provide a solid basis for understanding the abundance of various AHTPs in the lined seahorse as well as shed light on the development of antihypertensive products and drugs using seahorses as an important resource.

Longhe Yang, Fan Hu, Yajun Yan et al.

Microalgae extracts have a wide range of uses in the field of healthcare and nutrition. However, the use of microalgae extracts in anti-inflammatory properties and their mechanism of action have not yet been fully studied. Here, we show that extracts from Chlorella sp. WZ13 (CSE-WZ13) dose-dependently reduced nitrite production, inhibited the expression of inducible nitric oxide synthase (iNOS) protein, and decreased the production of the gene and inflammatory cytokines tumor necrosis factor-α (TNF-α) and interleukin-6 (IL-6), in lipopolysaccharide (LPS)-stimulated RAW264.7 cells. Using high-content imaging analysis, it was found that CSE-WZ13 inhibited the translocation of nuclear factor kappa B (NF-κB) from the cytoplasm to the nucleus. CSE-WZ13 also exerted anti-inflammatory effects in an ear edema mouse model induced by 12-O-tetradecanoylphorbol-13-acetate (TPA). CSE-WZ13 inhibited edema by 36.17% and 25.66% at a dose of 0.3 and 0.1 mg/ear, respectively. Histological analysis showed that topical application of CSE-WZ13 decreased TPA-induced inflammatory cell infiltration. Our results indicate that CSE-WZ13 may be a useful candidate for the purpose of decreasing inflammation.

Vishal Sunder, Samuel Thomas, Hong-Kwang J. Kuo et al.

Dialog history plays an important role in spoken language understanding (SLU) performance in a dialog system. For end-to-end (E2E) SLU, previous work has used dialog history in text form, which makes the model dependent on a cascaded automatic speech recognizer (ASR). This rescinds the benefits of an E2E system which is intended to be compact and robust to ASR errors. In this paper, we propose a hierarchical conversation model that is capable of directly using dialog history in speech form, making it fully E2E. We also distill semantic knowledge from the available gold conversation transcripts by jointly training a similar text-based conversation model with an explicit tying of acoustic and semantic embeddings. We also propose a novel technique that we call DropFrame to deal with the long training time incurred by adding dialog history in an E2E manner. On the HarperValleyBank dialog dataset, our E2E history integration outperforms a history independent baseline by 7.7% absolute F1 score on the task of dialog action recognition. Our model performs competitively with the state-of-the-art history based cascaded baseline, but uses 48% fewer parameters. In the absence of gold transcripts to fine-tune an ASR model, our model outperforms this baseline by a significant margin of 10% absolute F1 score.

Bethania Nicora, Rosario Soledad Barranquero, Silvina Graciela Etcheverría et al.

[Introducción]: En América Latina prevalece un manejo descoordinado y fragmentado de los recursos hídricos por la utilización de enfoques sectoriales y por la falta de información y sistematización. La Gestión Integrada de Recursos Hídricos (GIRH), enfoque que apunta a la consideración combinada de las dimensiones sociales, económicas y ecológicas con base en la gestión intersectorial y planificación integrada, es reconocida como apropiada para responder a los desafíos de la gestión sustentable. [Objetivo]: Se planteó como objetivo analizar, de forma integral, las variables físico-naturales y sociales que definen la problemática del agua de consumo en las escuelas rurales del partido de Tandil. [Metodología]: Se realizaron análisis fisicoquímicos y microbiológicos para determinar la potabilidad del recurso, se desarrolló y aplicó un índice del nivel de manejo del agua en las escuelas, así como una entrevista a un informante clave del Consejo Escolar de Tandil, para evaluar el manejo institucional del recurso y, por último, las variables relevadas se analizaron por completo. [Resultados]: Los resultados indicaron que microbiológicamente el agua no es apta para el consumo en el 73 % de las escuelas y que el manejo institucional dista de una conceptualización de gestión integral. [Conclusiones]: A partir de la integración de los resultados se concluye que dicho manejo influye directamente sobre la calidad del agua, evidenciado en los problemas microbiológicos detectados. Se identifican las principales falencias del manejo actual y se destaca la necesidad de asumir medidas institucionales que tiendan a una gestión integral del recurso.

Jamie Behan, Bai Li, Yong Chen

The Gulf of Maine (GOM) is a highly complex environment and previous studies have suggested the need to account for spatial nonstationarity in species distribution models (SDMs) for the American lobster (Homarus americanus). To explore impacts of spatial nonstationarity on species distribution, we compared models with the following three assumptions : (1) large-scale and stationary relationships between species distributions and environmental variables; (2) meso-scale models where estimated relationships differ between eastern and western GOM, and (3) finer-scale models where estimated relationships vary across eastern, central, and western regions of the GOM. The spatial scales used in these models were largely determined by the GOM coastal currents. Lobster data were sourced from the Maine-New Hampshire Inshore Bottom Trawl Survey from years 2000–2019. We considered spatial and environmental variables including latitude and longitude, bottom temperature, bottom salinity, distance from shore, and sediment grain size in the study. We forecasted distributions for the period 2028–2055 using each of these models under the Representative Concentration Pathway (RCP) 8.5 “business as usual” climate warming scenario. We found that the model with the third assumption (i.e., finest scale) performed best. This suggests that accounting for spatial nonstationarity in the GOM leads to improved distribution estimates. Large-scale models revealed a tendency to estimate global relationships that better represented a specific location within the study area, rather than estimating relationships appropriate across all spatial areas. Forecasted distributions revealed that the largest scale models tended to comparatively overestimate most season × sex × size group lobster abundances in western GOM, underestimate in the western portion of central GOM, and overestimate in the eastern portion of central GOM, with slightly less consistent and patchy trends amongst groups in eastern GOM. The differences between model estimates were greatest between the largest and finest scale models, suggesting that fine-scale models may be useful for capturing effects of unique dependencies that may operate at localized scales. We demonstrate how estimates of season-, sex-, and size- specific American lobster spatial distribution would vary based on the spatial scale assumption of nonstationarity in the GOM. This information may help develop appropriate local adaptation measures in a region that is susceptible to climate change.

Ye Liu, Wolfgang Maier, Wolfgang Minker et al.

This paper presents an automatic method to evaluate the naturalness of natural language generation in dialogue systems. While this task was previously rendered through expensive and time-consuming human labor, we present this novel task of automatic naturalness evaluation of generated language. By fine-tuning the BERT model, our proposed naturalness evaluation method shows robust results and outperforms the baselines: support vector machines, bi-directional LSTMs, and BLEURT. In addition, the training speed and evaluation performance of naturalness model are improved by transfer learning from quality and informativeness linguistic knowledge.

Nichole Flynn, Naweed I. Syed

The mechanism of postsynaptic neurotransmitter receptor clustering has been best described at the neuromuscular junction (NMJ), where pockets of nicotinic acetylcholine receptors (nAChRs) in muscle fiber are redistributed to the synaptic site upon motor neuron innervation. This process of receptor localization is facilitated by agrin signaling, and the stability of the resulting nAChR clusters depends upon the activation of Src family kinases (SFKs). In contrast to the NMJ, however, the cellular signaling mechanisms orchestrating the clustering of nAChRs in the central nervous system (CNS) remain poorly defined. Furthermore, our understanding of the role of SFKs in the CNS is also limited. Here, we provide evidence that SFK activation is required for synapse formation between pairs of identified neurons isolated from the CNS of Lymnaea stagnalis. Furthermore, we suggest that SFKs are involved in the functional redistribution of nAChRs to the synaptic contact sites in isolated axons. To the best of our knowledge, this study is the first to demonstrate a role for SFKs in the clustering of nAChRs in central neurons, suggesting that the mechanisms of receptor clustering between the peripheral nervous system (PNS) and CNS are likely conserved.

Alexandre Somavilla, Raimundo Nonato Martins de Moraes Junior, José Albertino Rafael

Most studies about the insect community in rainforests only focus on the forest understory, and even though the rainforest canopy is one of the most fascinating and diverse environments, it remains poorly explored. Therefore, we analyzed the difference between the social wasp composition in these two strata at the ZF-2 Station in the Brazilian Amazon Rainforest, using flight interception traps (Malaise model Gressi and Gressi), in the rainforest understory and canopy. We collected ninety-two species belonging to 18 genera; Polybia was the richest genera (22 species), followed by Mischocyttarus (14) and Agelaia (13). Forty-four species were exclusively collected in the understory, twenty exclusively collected in the canopy, and twenty-eight in both strata. The understory was distinctly more diverse and more abundant than the canopy, while some rare or poorly collected species were only found in the canopy. We found a strong relationship between the species composition at the ZF-2 Station and the Ducke Reserve. Therefore, we suggest using traps in canopy in the Amazon biome as an effective method for collecting a higher diversity of social wasps.

Pedro Cardoso, Vaughn Shirey, Sini Seppälä et al.