28 March 2013Last updated at 21:09 ETBy Victoria GillScience reporter, BBC News
On its own, each robot would 'just get lost' but as a colony they can navigate
Scientists in the US have built and tested robotic ants that they say behave just like a real ant colony.
The robots do not resemble their insect counterparts; they are tiny cubes equipped with two watch motors to power the wheels that enable them to move.
But their collective behaviour is remarkably ant-like.
By being programmed simply to move forward toward a target and avoid obstacles, the robot colony finds the fastest way through a network or maze.
The secret, the researchers report in the open access journal Plos Computational Biology, is in their ability to take cues from one another - just like an insect swarm.
"Each individual robot is pretty dumb," said Simon Garnier from the New Jersey Institute of Technology, lead researcher on the study. "They have very limited memory and limited processing power."
"By themselves, each robot would just move around randomly and get lost... but [they] are able to work together and communicate."
This is because, like ants, the robots leave a trail that the others follow; while ants leave a trail of chemicals - or pheromones - that their nest mates are able to sniff out, the robots leave a trail of light.
Continue reading the main story
?Start Quote
You don't need something as complex as choice to get some of the behaviour you see in ants?
End QuoteDr Paul GrahamUniversity of Sussex
To achieve this, the researchers set up a camera to track the path of each robot. A projector connected to the camera then produced a spot of light at regular intervals along their route, leaving a "breadcrumb trail" of light that got brighter every time another robot tracked over the same path.
Dr Garnier explained: "[The robots each] have two antennae on top, which are light sensors. If more light falls on their left sensor they turn left, and if more light falls on the right sensor, they turn right."
"It's exactly the same mechanism as ants."
The researcher explained how both the robots and ants worked together, describing their navigation skills as a "positive feedback loop".
"If there are two possible paths from A to B and one is twice as long as [the other], at the beginning, the ants [or] robots start using each path equally.
"Because ants taking the shorter path travel faster, the amount of pheromone (or light) deposited on that path grows faster, so more ants use that path."
Learning from nature Continue reading the main story
Superorganisms
There are an estimated 20,000 species of ants in the world
Ant colonies have structured social system, with different castes - worker, soldier, queen and drone - all of which carry out specific tasks for the colony
Ant colonies are sometimes referred to as "superorganisms" because ants appear to operate as a single entity
There are many other research and engineering projects that take inspiration from nature to solve problems or design robots, as Dr Paul Graham, a biologist from the University of Sussex, explained.
"The classic example," he said, "is the way in which we design information networks to move packets of data around.
"Ants don't have someone in charge telling them where to go, so you can [mimic this].
For instance - in a complex network, there may be a junction with different possible routes that packets [of data] could take. Packets would leave messages for each other at the junction to give information about which routes were quick."
This, he explained, is the basis of an algorithm called ant colony optimisation which has already been used in telecoms networks.
And although Dr Graham doesn't see an immediate practical use for these particular robotic insects he says the study demonstrates an important and interesting piece of biology.
"Lots of animal behaviour gets described using words like 'choice'.
"This shows that you don't need something as complex as choice to get some of the behaviour you see in ants.
New vaccine-design approach targets HIV and other fast-mutating virusesPublic release date: 28-Mar-2013 [ | E-mail | Share ]
Contact: Mika Ono mikaono@scripps.edu 858-784-2052 Scripps Research Institute
LA JOLLA, CA March 28, 2013 A team led by scientists from The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI) and the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative (IAVI) has unveiled a new technique for vaccine design that could be particularly useful against HIV and other fast-changing viruses.
The report, which appears March 28, 2013, in Science Express, the early online edition of the journal Science, offers a step toward solving what has been one of the central problems of modern vaccine design: how to stimulate the immune system to produce the right kind of antibody response to protect against a wide range of viral strains. The researchers demonstrated their new technique by engineering an immunogen (substance that induces immunity) that has promise to reliably initiate an otherwise rare response effective against many types of HIV.
"We're hoping to test this immunogen soon in mice engineered to produce human antibodies, and eventually in humans," said team leader William R. Schief, who is an associate professor of immunology and member of the IAVI Neutralizing Antibody Center at TSRI.
Seeking a Better Way
For highly variable viruses such as HIV and influenza, vaccine researchers want to elicit antibodies that protect against most or all viral strainsnot just a few strains, as seasonal flu vaccines currently on the market. Vaccine researchers have identified several of these broadly neutralizing antibodies from long-term HIV-positive survivors, harvesting antibody-producing B cells from blood samples and then sifting through them to identify those that produce antibodies capable of neutralizing multiple strains of HIV. Such broadly neutralizing antibodies typically work by blocking crucial functional sites on a virus that are conserved among different strains despite high mutation elsewhere.
However, even with these powerful broadly neutralizing antibodies in hand, scientists need to find a way to elicit their production in the body through a vaccine. "For example, to elicit broadly neutralizing antibodies called VRC01-class antibodies that neutralize 90 percent of known HIV strains, you could try using the HIV envelope protein as your immunogen," said Schief, "but you run into the problem that the envelope protein doesn't bind with any detectable affinity to the B cells needed to launch a broadly neutralizing antibody response."
To reliably initiate that VRC01-class antibody response, Schief and his colleagues therefore sought to develop a new method for designing vaccine immunogens.
From Weak to Strong
Joseph Jardine, a TSRI graduate student in the Schief laboratory, evaluated the genes of VRC01-producing B cells in order to deduce the identities of the less mature B cellsknown as germline B cellsfrom which they originate. Germline B cells are major targets of modern viral vaccines, because it is the initial stimulation of these B cells and their antibodies that leads to a long-term antibody response.
In response to vaccination, germline B cells could, in principle, mature into the desired VRC01-producing B cellsbut natural HIV proteins fail to bind or stimulate these germline B cells so they cannot get the process started. The team thus set out to design an artificial immunogen that would be successful at achieving this.
Jardine used a protein modeling software suite called Rosetta to improve the binding of VRC01 germline B cell antibodies to HIV's envelope protein. "We asked Rosetta to look for mutations on the side of the HIV envelope protein that would help it bind tightly to our germline antibodies," he said.
Rosetta identified dozens of mutations that could help improve binding to germline antibodies. Jardine then generated libraries that contained all possible combinations of beneficial mutations, resulting in millions of mutants, and screened them using techniques called yeast surface display and FACS. This combination of computational prediction and directed evolution successfully produced a few mutant envelope proteins with high affinity for germline VRC01-class antibodies.
Jardine then focused on making a minimal immunogenmuch smaller than HIV envelopeand so continued development using the "engineered outer domain (eOD)" previously developed by Po-Ssu Huang in the Schief lab while Schief was at the University of Washington. Several iterative rounds of design and selection using a panel of germline antibodies produced a final, optimized immunogena construct they called eOD-GT6.
A Closer Look
To get a better look at eOD-GT6 and its interaction with germline antibodies, the team turned to the laboratory of Ian A. Wilson, chair of the Department of Integrative Structural and Computational Biology and a member of the IAVI Neutralizing Antibody Center at TSRI.
Jean-Philippe Julien, a senior research associate in the Wilson laboratory, determined the 3D atomic structure of the designed immunogen using X-ray crystallographyand, in an unusual feat, also determined the crystal structure of a germline VRC01 antibody, plus the structure of the immunogen and antibody bound together.
"We wanted to know whether eOD-GT6 looked the way we anticipated and whether it bound to the antibody in the way that we predictedand in both cases the answer was 'yes'," said Julien. "We also were able to identify the key mutations that conferred its reactivity with germline VRC01 antibodies."
Mimicking a Virus
Vaccine researchers know that such an immunogen typically does better at stimulating an antibody response when it is presented not as a single copy but in a closely spaced cluster of multiple copies, and with only its antibody-binding end exposed. "We wanted it to look like a virus," said Sergey Menis, a visiting graduate student in the Schief laboratory.
Menis therefore devised a tiny virus-mimicking particle made from 60 copies of an obscure bacterial enzyme and coated it with 60 copies of eOD-GT6. The particle worked well at activating VRC01 germline B cells and even mature B cells in the lab dish, whereas single-copy eOD-GT6 did not.
"Essentially it's a self-assembling nanoparticle that presents the immunogen in a properly oriented way," Menis said. "We're hoping that this approach can be used not just for an HIV vaccine but for many other vaccines, too."
The next step for the eOD-GT6 immunogen project, said Schief, is to test its ability to stimulate an antibody response in lab animals that are themselves engineered to produce human germline antibodies. The difficulty with testing immunogens that target human germline antibodies is that animals typically used for vaccine testing cannot make those same antibodies. So the team is collaborating with other researchers who are engineering mice to produce human germline antibodies. After that, he hopes to learn how to drive the response, from the activation of the germline B cells all the way to the production of mature, broadly neutralizing VRC01-class antibodies, using a series of designed immunogens.
Schief also hopes they will be able to test their germline-targeting approach in humans sooner rather than later, noting "it will be really important to find out if this works in a human being."
###
The first authors of the paper, "Rational HIV immunogen design to target specific germline B cell receptors," were Jardine, Julien and Menis. Co-authors were Takayuki Ota and Devin Sok of the Nemazee and Burton laboratories at TSRI, respectively; Travis Nieusma of the Ward laboratory at TSRI; John Mathison of the Ulevitch laboratory at TSRI; Oleksandr Kalyuzhniy and Skye MacPherson, researchers in the Schief laboratory from IAVI and TSRI, respectively; Po-Ssu Huang and David Baker of the University of Washington, Seattle; Andrew McGuire and Leonidas Stamatatos of the Seattle Biomedical Research Institute; and TSRI principal investigators Andrew B. Ward, David Nemazee, Ian A. Wilson, and Dennis R. Burton, who is also head of the IAVI Neutralizing Center at TSRI.
The project was funded in part by IAVI; the National Institutes of Health (AI84817, AI081625 and AI33292); and the Ragon Institute.
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New vaccine-design approach targets HIV and other fast-mutating virusesPublic release date: 28-Mar-2013 [ | E-mail | Share ]
Contact: Mika Ono mikaono@scripps.edu 858-784-2052 Scripps Research Institute
LA JOLLA, CA March 28, 2013 A team led by scientists from The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI) and the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative (IAVI) has unveiled a new technique for vaccine design that could be particularly useful against HIV and other fast-changing viruses.
The report, which appears March 28, 2013, in Science Express, the early online edition of the journal Science, offers a step toward solving what has been one of the central problems of modern vaccine design: how to stimulate the immune system to produce the right kind of antibody response to protect against a wide range of viral strains. The researchers demonstrated their new technique by engineering an immunogen (substance that induces immunity) that has promise to reliably initiate an otherwise rare response effective against many types of HIV.
"We're hoping to test this immunogen soon in mice engineered to produce human antibodies, and eventually in humans," said team leader William R. Schief, who is an associate professor of immunology and member of the IAVI Neutralizing Antibody Center at TSRI.
Seeking a Better Way
For highly variable viruses such as HIV and influenza, vaccine researchers want to elicit antibodies that protect against most or all viral strainsnot just a few strains, as seasonal flu vaccines currently on the market. Vaccine researchers have identified several of these broadly neutralizing antibodies from long-term HIV-positive survivors, harvesting antibody-producing B cells from blood samples and then sifting through them to identify those that produce antibodies capable of neutralizing multiple strains of HIV. Such broadly neutralizing antibodies typically work by blocking crucial functional sites on a virus that are conserved among different strains despite high mutation elsewhere.
However, even with these powerful broadly neutralizing antibodies in hand, scientists need to find a way to elicit their production in the body through a vaccine. "For example, to elicit broadly neutralizing antibodies called VRC01-class antibodies that neutralize 90 percent of known HIV strains, you could try using the HIV envelope protein as your immunogen," said Schief, "but you run into the problem that the envelope protein doesn't bind with any detectable affinity to the B cells needed to launch a broadly neutralizing antibody response."
To reliably initiate that VRC01-class antibody response, Schief and his colleagues therefore sought to develop a new method for designing vaccine immunogens.
From Weak to Strong
Joseph Jardine, a TSRI graduate student in the Schief laboratory, evaluated the genes of VRC01-producing B cells in order to deduce the identities of the less mature B cellsknown as germline B cellsfrom which they originate. Germline B cells are major targets of modern viral vaccines, because it is the initial stimulation of these B cells and their antibodies that leads to a long-term antibody response.
In response to vaccination, germline B cells could, in principle, mature into the desired VRC01-producing B cellsbut natural HIV proteins fail to bind or stimulate these germline B cells so they cannot get the process started. The team thus set out to design an artificial immunogen that would be successful at achieving this.
Jardine used a protein modeling software suite called Rosetta to improve the binding of VRC01 germline B cell antibodies to HIV's envelope protein. "We asked Rosetta to look for mutations on the side of the HIV envelope protein that would help it bind tightly to our germline antibodies," he said.
Rosetta identified dozens of mutations that could help improve binding to germline antibodies. Jardine then generated libraries that contained all possible combinations of beneficial mutations, resulting in millions of mutants, and screened them using techniques called yeast surface display and FACS. This combination of computational prediction and directed evolution successfully produced a few mutant envelope proteins with high affinity for germline VRC01-class antibodies.
Jardine then focused on making a minimal immunogenmuch smaller than HIV envelopeand so continued development using the "engineered outer domain (eOD)" previously developed by Po-Ssu Huang in the Schief lab while Schief was at the University of Washington. Several iterative rounds of design and selection using a panel of germline antibodies produced a final, optimized immunogena construct they called eOD-GT6.
A Closer Look
To get a better look at eOD-GT6 and its interaction with germline antibodies, the team turned to the laboratory of Ian A. Wilson, chair of the Department of Integrative Structural and Computational Biology and a member of the IAVI Neutralizing Antibody Center at TSRI.
Jean-Philippe Julien, a senior research associate in the Wilson laboratory, determined the 3D atomic structure of the designed immunogen using X-ray crystallographyand, in an unusual feat, also determined the crystal structure of a germline VRC01 antibody, plus the structure of the immunogen and antibody bound together.
"We wanted to know whether eOD-GT6 looked the way we anticipated and whether it bound to the antibody in the way that we predictedand in both cases the answer was 'yes'," said Julien. "We also were able to identify the key mutations that conferred its reactivity with germline VRC01 antibodies."
Mimicking a Virus
Vaccine researchers know that such an immunogen typically does better at stimulating an antibody response when it is presented not as a single copy but in a closely spaced cluster of multiple copies, and with only its antibody-binding end exposed. "We wanted it to look like a virus," said Sergey Menis, a visiting graduate student in the Schief laboratory.
Menis therefore devised a tiny virus-mimicking particle made from 60 copies of an obscure bacterial enzyme and coated it with 60 copies of eOD-GT6. The particle worked well at activating VRC01 germline B cells and even mature B cells in the lab dish, whereas single-copy eOD-GT6 did not.
"Essentially it's a self-assembling nanoparticle that presents the immunogen in a properly oriented way," Menis said. "We're hoping that this approach can be used not just for an HIV vaccine but for many other vaccines, too."
The next step for the eOD-GT6 immunogen project, said Schief, is to test its ability to stimulate an antibody response in lab animals that are themselves engineered to produce human germline antibodies. The difficulty with testing immunogens that target human germline antibodies is that animals typically used for vaccine testing cannot make those same antibodies. So the team is collaborating with other researchers who are engineering mice to produce human germline antibodies. After that, he hopes to learn how to drive the response, from the activation of the germline B cells all the way to the production of mature, broadly neutralizing VRC01-class antibodies, using a series of designed immunogens.
Schief also hopes they will be able to test their germline-targeting approach in humans sooner rather than later, noting "it will be really important to find out if this works in a human being."
###
The first authors of the paper, "Rational HIV immunogen design to target specific germline B cell receptors," were Jardine, Julien and Menis. Co-authors were Takayuki Ota and Devin Sok of the Nemazee and Burton laboratories at TSRI, respectively; Travis Nieusma of the Ward laboratory at TSRI; John Mathison of the Ulevitch laboratory at TSRI; Oleksandr Kalyuzhniy and Skye MacPherson, researchers in the Schief laboratory from IAVI and TSRI, respectively; Po-Ssu Huang and David Baker of the University of Washington, Seattle; Andrew McGuire and Leonidas Stamatatos of the Seattle Biomedical Research Institute; and TSRI principal investigators Andrew B. Ward, David Nemazee, Ian A. Wilson, and Dennis R. Burton, who is also head of the IAVI Neutralizing Center at TSRI.
The project was funded in part by IAVI; the National Institutes of Health (AI84817, AI081625 and AI33292); and the Ragon Institute.
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AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
Google made plenty of nerds happy earlier today when it began reaching out to the 8,000 people that would have the privilege of spending $1,500 on the company's head-mounted Glass display, but that thrill wound up being short-lived for some. About seven hours after announcing that the outreach to would-be Glass Explorers began, the Glass team once again took to the project's Google Plus page to admit they needed to rescind some of those invitations.
Multiple moves found harmful to poor young childrenPublic release date: 28-Mar-2013 [ | E-mail | Share ]
Contact: Sarah Mancoll smancoll@srcd.org 202-289-7905 Society for Research in Child Development
Poor children who move three or more times before they turn 5 have more behavior problems than their peers, according to a new study by researchers at Cornell University and the National Employment Law Project. The study is published in the journal Child Development.
Moving is a fairly common experience for American families; in 2002, 6.5 percent of all children had been living in their current home for less than six months. Among low-income children, that number rose to 10 percent. In addition, in 2002, 13 percent of families above poverty moved once, but 24 percent of families below poverty moved. Research has shown that frequent moves are related to a range of behavioral, emotional, and school problems for adolescents.
Using national data on 2,810 children from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study, a longitudinal, representative study of children born in 20 large U.S. cities between 1998 and 2000, researchers sought to determine how frequent moves relate to children's readiness for school. Parents were interviewed shortly after the birth of their children, then again by phone when the children were 1, 3, and 5; in-home assessments were done when the children were 3 and 5. The study also looked at the children's language and literacy outcomes, as well as behavior problems reported by mothers.
The study found that 23 percent of the children had never moved, 48 percent had moved once or twice, and 29 percent had moved three or more times. Among children who moved three or more times before age 5, nearly half (44 percent) were poor; poverty was defined based on the official federal threshold. Moving three or more times was not related to the children's language and literacy outcomes.
But children who moved three or more times had more attention problems, anxiousness or depression, and aggressiveness or hyperactivity at age 5 than those who had never moved or those who had moved once or twice. These increases in behavior problems occurred only among poor children, the study found, suggesting that frequent moves early in life are most disruptive for the most disadvantaged children.
"The United States is still recovering from the great recession, which has taken a major toll on the housing market," notes Kathleen Ziol-Guest, postdoctoral associate at Cornell University, who led the study. "As housing markets have collapsed across communities, highly mobile low-income families have moved in search of work and less expensive housing.
"The findings in this study suggest that the housing crisis and its accompanying increase in mobility likely will have negative effects on young children, especially poor children."
###
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AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
Multiple moves found harmful to poor young childrenPublic release date: 28-Mar-2013 [ | E-mail | Share ]
Contact: Sarah Mancoll smancoll@srcd.org 202-289-7905 Society for Research in Child Development
Poor children who move three or more times before they turn 5 have more behavior problems than their peers, according to a new study by researchers at Cornell University and the National Employment Law Project. The study is published in the journal Child Development.
Moving is a fairly common experience for American families; in 2002, 6.5 percent of all children had been living in their current home for less than six months. Among low-income children, that number rose to 10 percent. In addition, in 2002, 13 percent of families above poverty moved once, but 24 percent of families below poverty moved. Research has shown that frequent moves are related to a range of behavioral, emotional, and school problems for adolescents.
Using national data on 2,810 children from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study, a longitudinal, representative study of children born in 20 large U.S. cities between 1998 and 2000, researchers sought to determine how frequent moves relate to children's readiness for school. Parents were interviewed shortly after the birth of their children, then again by phone when the children were 1, 3, and 5; in-home assessments were done when the children were 3 and 5. The study also looked at the children's language and literacy outcomes, as well as behavior problems reported by mothers.
The study found that 23 percent of the children had never moved, 48 percent had moved once or twice, and 29 percent had moved three or more times. Among children who moved three or more times before age 5, nearly half (44 percent) were poor; poverty was defined based on the official federal threshold. Moving three or more times was not related to the children's language and literacy outcomes.
But children who moved three or more times had more attention problems, anxiousness or depression, and aggressiveness or hyperactivity at age 5 than those who had never moved or those who had moved once or twice. These increases in behavior problems occurred only among poor children, the study found, suggesting that frequent moves early in life are most disruptive for the most disadvantaged children.
"The United States is still recovering from the great recession, which has taken a major toll on the housing market," notes Kathleen Ziol-Guest, postdoctoral associate at Cornell University, who led the study. "As housing markets have collapsed across communities, highly mobile low-income families have moved in search of work and less expensive housing.
"The findings in this study suggest that the housing crisis and its accompanying increase in mobility likely will have negative effects on young children, especially poor children."
###
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?
AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
OUYA is coming soon (tomorrow is the planned ship date for the earliest Kickstarter backers), and recent reports of emulators of classic gaming consoles made for the Android device are generating some buzz. Today, emulator developer Robert Broglia, who?s responsible for some of the most popular Android emulators including Snes9x EX+, has revealed to OUYAForum that he?s working on emulators for Game Boy Advance, Sega Genesis, NeoGeo and more.
Snes9x EX+ is the first he?s hoping to release, with a test APK (Android file package) due soon, though he says he won?t have his own OUYA to test out the emulators before April, since he pre-ordered the console only after it finished its Kickstarter run. Broglia plans to port versions of most of his Android-based game console emulators, however, including ones for TurboGrafx-16, Atari, Sega Saturn and ColecoVision, in addition to those mentioned above.
Broglia charges for the emulators he offers on Android, but OUYA has its rules about content that stipulate content must have at least some kind of free-to-play or free-to-try. Also on tap are an x86 PC emulator that will allow use of classic DOS gaming software on the OUYA, as well as a Commodore 64 emulator, both from?separate?developers. In other words, the OUYA is set to become a nostalgia machine for gamers who grew up in the 80s and 90s.
Already one OUYA emulation project has been approved for inclusion in the official marketplace, but when I contacted OUYA directly to learn about whether or not they have an official stance on emulation, I received no response. As mentioned, the Google PLay store has emulation apps available, and developers have commented in the past about how open the marketplace is for the upcoming Android console.
Past devices have built their entire existence around game emulation, including the GP2K Wiz and Canoo from South Korea?s GamePark holdings. OUYA?s focus is much broader, but as a simple, living-room based way to bring games of old back to people?s televisions (even if the method of doing so isn?t strictly legal), it could hold significant appeal to niche audience above and beyond its other merits.
Update: OUYA got back to us with the following regarding its official position on emulation:
OUYA will accept emulators as long as they adhere to our content guidelines and are not submitted with any games.
OUYA was created in 2012 by Julie Uhrman, a video game industry veteran who saw an opportunity to open up the last closed game platform ? the TV. Julie and an initial team of game developers and advisors brought the concept to life with the help of Yves Behar and the fuseproject, and took it to Kickstarter in July of 2012. It became one of the most successful Kickstarter projects ever, with tens of thousands of backers pledging to...
Mar. 27, 2013 ? A study co-authored by a University of Florida scientist adds critical new data for understanding caribou calving grounds in an area under consideration for oil exploration in Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.
The research may be used to create improved conservation strategies for an ecologically important area that has been under evaluation for natural resource exploration since enactment of the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act in 1980.
By studying bone accumulations on the Arctic landscape, lead author Joshua Miller discovered rare habitats near river systems are more important for some caribou than previously believed. The study appearing online today in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B shows bone surveys conducted on foot provide highly detailed and extensive data on areas used by caribou as birthing grounds.
"The bone surveys are adding a new piece of the puzzle, giving us a way of studying how caribou use the landscape during calving and providing a longer perspective for evaluating the importance of different regions and habitats," said Miller, an assistant scientist at the Florida Museum of Natural History on the UF campus and a Fenneman assistant research professor at the University of Cincinnati.
Unlike other species in the deer family, both male and female caribou grow antlers. Males shed them after they mate, while pregnant females keep their antlers until they calve, losing them within a day or two of giving birth. Newborn caribou calves also suffer high mortality rates within the first couple days of birth. The female antlers and newborn skeletal remains offer a unique biological signal for understanding calving activity, Miller said.
"This new tool has a lot of potential, and the idea that these bones are providing new information is really exciting -- bone surveys allow us to go into the field today and collect historical information about ecosystems and animal communities that are sometimes only known from a few years of observation," Miller said.
Miller recorded evidence of shed caribou antlers and newborn skeletons from the Porcupine Caribou Herd in area 1002 on the coastal plain of the Arctic Refuge, which comprises about 1.5 million acres on Alaska's northeast border. Because these high-latitude habitats are frozen nearly three-quarters of the year, bones may be preserved on the landscape for hundreds or thousands of years, researchers said.
Testing two different habitats, the tussock tundra and riparian terraces, researchers found the latter has higher concentrations of shed female antlers and numerous newborn skeletons. The data suggests these terrace habitats are used more during some portions of the calving period than other areas traditionally viewed as primary calving terrain, which is important because they comprise less than 10 percent of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge calving grounds, Miller said.
"Bone surveys are suggesting that these riparian zones should be under special consideration as we think about how to manage the Arctic Refuge and ensure this herd prospers in the decades and centuries to come," Miller said.
The Porcupine Caribou Herd includes as many as 170,000 animals that are essential parts of the delicate Arctic ecosystem. These large, herbivorous, hoofed mammals are an important food source for many indigenous northern peoples and natural predators, including wolves, bears and eagles.
Anna Behrensmeyer, vertebrate paleontology curator at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History, said that using skeletal remains as a research tool is important because it helps scientists understand which habitats need protection with minimal disruption to caribou calving. It also allows researchers to collect historical information that may be used to better understand how climate change and other human influences have affected how these animals use the landscape over time.
"We tend to think that what we see now is normal, but we're just seeing a little bit of time," said Behrensmeyer, who was not involved with the study. "Josh's work can extend our time window back maybe hundreds of years, so there's the chance of seeing long-term cycles in the calving areas and also correlating those cycles with climate -- if you can look back into the past, you might see what this species did to adapt its reproductive strategies to warmer or colder climate periods."
Study co-authors include Patrick Druckenmiller of the University of Alaska Fairbanks Museum and Volker Bahn of Wright State University.
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The above story is reprinted from materials provided by University of Florida. The original article was written by Danielle Torrent.
Note: Materials may be edited for content and length. For further information, please contact the source cited above.
Journal Reference:
J. H. Miller, P. Druckenmiller, V. Bahn. Antlers on the Arctic Refuge: capturing multi-generational patterns of calving ground use from bones on the landscape. Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 2013; 280 (1759): 20130275 DOI: 10.1098/rspb.2013.0275
Note: If no author is given, the source is cited instead.
Disclaimer: Views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of ScienceDaily or its staff.
DOHA, Qatar (AP) ? Syrian opposition representatives took the country's seat for the first time at an Arab League summit that opened in Qatar on Tuesday, a significant diplomatic boost for the forces fighting President Bashar Assad's regime.
In a ceremonious entrance accompanied by applause, a delegation led by Mouaz al-Khatib, the former president of the main opposition alliance ? the Western-backed Syrian National Coalition ? took the seats assigned for Syria at the invitation of Qatar's emir, Sheik Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani.
Al-Khatib used the forum to call for a greater U.S. role in aiding the rebels and said he had appealed to Secretary of State John Kerry to consider using NATO Patriot anti-missile batteries in Turkey to help defend northern Syria against strikes by Assad's forces.
The decision for the opposition to take Syria's seat was made at the recommendation of Arab foreign ministers earlier this week in the Qatari capital, Doha. The Arab League in 2011 suspended the Syrian government's membership in the organization as punishment for the regime's crackdown on opponents.
The Qatari ruler, who chairs the summit, said the Syrian opposition deserves "this representation because of the popular legitimacy they have won at home and the broad support they won abroad and the historic role they have assumed in leading the revolution and preparing for building the new Syria."
The diplomatic triumph and Qatar's praise, however, could not conceal the disarray within the top ranks of the Syrian opposition.
Besides al-Khatib, the Syrian delegation included Ghassan Hitto, recently elected prime minister of a planned interim government to administer rebel-held areas in Syria, and two prominent opposition figures, George Sabra and Suheir Atassi.
Addressing the gathering, al-Khatib thanked the Arab League for granting the seat to the opposition. "It is part of the restoration of legitimacy that the people of Syria have long been robbed of," he said.
He lamented the inaction of several foreign governments, which he did not name, toward the Syrian crisis and spoke emotionally of the suffering of the civilians in his country.
"I convey to you the greetings of the orphans, widows, the wounded, the detained and the homeless," al-Khatib told the gathering in an opulent hall in Doha.
He also defended the presence in Syria of foreign jihadis, saying the militants were there to help defend a people under attack but adding that those more needed by their families in their own countries should leave.
"Is it the beards or the fact that they are foreigners?" he asked, referring to concern in the West and elsewhere that hard-line Islamic fighters are at the forefront of the battle against the Syrian regime.
"Why is no one saying anything about the Iranian and Russian advisers and Hezbollah?" he asked, a reference to opposition claims that the Syrian regime's main allies are directly involved in the fighting.
Even as rebel fighters gain more territory on the ground in their fight against Assad's troops, their mostly exile political leadership has been divided. Al-Khatib announced his resignation on Sunday because of what he described as restrictions on his work and frustration with the level of international aid for the opposition. The coalition rejected the resignation and al-Khatib said he would discuss the issue later and represent the opposition at the Qatar summit "in the name of the Syrian people."
Also, Hitto's election as the head of the interim government was rejected by the opposition's military office, which said he was not a consensus figure. Some members have accused Qatar and the Muslim Brotherhood of imposing their will on the Coalition.
In Damascus, the government on Tuesday blasted the Arab League's move to allow the opposition to take its seat at the Doha summit, portraying it as a selling-out of Arab identity to please Israel and the United States.
"The Arab League has blown up all its charters and pledges to preserve common Arab security, and the shameful decisions it has taken against the Syrian people since the beginning of the crisis and until now have sustained our conviction that it has exchanged its Arab identity with a Zionist-American one," said an editorial in the Al-Thawra newspaper, a government mouthpiece.
"The Syrians are fully aware that this is not a summit of the Arabs, and Arabism means nothing without Syria," it said, adding that recognizing the opposition "legitimizes terrorist acts that are committed overtly and blatantly against the Syrians, their institutions and properties."
The government in Damascus says the conflict is an international conspiracy to weaken Syria being carried out by terrorists on the ground.
Addressing the summit, Arab League chief Nabil Elaraby warned that the Syrian conflict would have "grave repercussions" on the whole region and blamed Assad's regime for the failure to end the strife.
A "political settlement of the Syrian crisis is the choice that should be undertaken," he said.
The crisis began in March 2011 with protests demanding Assad's ouster. With a harsh government crackdown, the uprising steadily grew more violent until it became a full-fledged civil war. The United Nations estimates that more than 70,000 people have died so far in the conflict.
The emir of Qatar, a tiny but super-rich nation that is assuming a growing regional role, proposed a "mini" Arab summit in Egypt to negotiate reconciliation between rival Palestinian factions, the Western-backed President Mahmoud Abbas' Fatah movement that controls the West Bank and the militant Hamas group, which rules the Gaza Strip.
He said the proposed summit would remain in session until an agreement is reached, including a timetable for the creation of a transitional government to oversee legislative and presidential elections.
Sheik Hamad also proposed creating a $1 billion fund for the defense of Jerusalem's Arab identity. Qatar, he said, would contribute $250 million and expects other Arab nations to come up with the rest.
"The Palestinian, Arab and Muslim rights in Jerusalem are not negotiable and Israel must realize this," he said.
The Qatari emir also called on fellow Arab nations to help Egypt overcome its economic difficulties.
"It the duty of all of us to offer support to the brotherly Arab Republic of Egypt under these circumstances," he said.
Qatar has been generous with Egypt to keep its economy afloat and the emir's call for others to help betrayed the reluctance of other oil-rich nations to follow suit or offer significant assistance.
However, when Egypt's Islamist president took the floor in the summit's evening session, he warned against foreign meddling in his nation.
Mohammed Morsi said he would deal "firmly" and "decisively" with any foreign attempt to meddle in the affairs of his country, which has been mired in turmoil for most of the two years since Hosni Mubarak's ouster.
"Anyone is tempted to do so will be decisively and firmly countered by us," Morsi said. "We don't accept anyone sticking his finger inside Egypt." But he didn't elaborate.
Egypt is embroiled in a tug of war pitting Morsi and his Islamist allies against a mostly secular and liberal opposition. The crippling political impasse is compounded by economic woes and tenuous security.
___
Associated Press reporters Hamza Hendawi in Cairo and Albert Aji in Damascus contributed to this report.
People hold up a flight information sign that fell on a family, killing a boy and injuring mother Heather Bresette and two other sons in Birmingham-Shuttlesworth International Airport on Friday.
By Kathy Wingard, The Associated Press
MONTGOMERY, Ala. -- As airport officials tried to figure out how a 300-pound arrival-departure panel fell off the wall and onto a family, the mother of a boy who was killed by the sign lay in a hospital with her own injuries, still unaware of what happened.
Heather Bresette and two of her other sons were seriously hurt when the panel fell Friday at the Birmingham-Shuttlesworth International Airport. She had surgeries for broken ankles and a crushed pelvis over the weekend, but she was still in intensive care and unconscious.
"She does not know that her baby is dead," the family's priest, the Rev. Don Farnan, said.
The Bresettes, a family of seven, took a weeklong spring break vacation to Destin, Fla., and were about to fly home to Overland Park, Kan., when the flight information panel fell.
Luke Bresette, the middle of five children, was killed. His brother, 5-year-old Tyler, suffered a concussion. His 8-year-old brother, Sam, had a broken leg and nose.
Tyler was released from a children's hospital Sunday; Sam was still there.
The boys' father, Ryan Bresette, and an older son and daughter, were at the airport when the sign fell but not hurt.
Heather Bresette's condition improved to serious on Sunday, University Hospital spokeswoman Nicole Wyatt said.
During their vacation, the family swam in the Gulf of Mexico and Luke went parasailing for the first time.
"His dad said he was thrilled. He was an adventurous kid. He loved sports," said Farnan, a priest at St. Thomas More in Kansas City, Mo.
After the sign fell, it took six people to lift the large board and a dozen people to hold it up while first responders administered aid. Officials were investigating how the sign fell at the newly renovated airport and took down an identical billboard on Saturday.
'Terrible tragedy' The renovated concourse opened March 13. It was part of an ongoing $200 million upgrade of Birmingham's airport. The construction began in June 2011 and is being overseen by Brasfield & Gorrie Global Services Group.
The Birmingham-based company said in a statement it was working with airport authorities to determine why the sign fell.
"This is a terrible tragedy that none of us fully understand, and we hope that the family who lost their loved one will find strength through prayer and the support of all of us," the statement said.
At St. Thomas More, hundreds of worshippers showed up for a Saturday morning Mass that usually has about 75 people. Luke's uncle Alex Bresette placed a Rockhurst High School jersey on the altar.
"He would have been in the Class of 2020," he told the Kansas City Star.
Ryan Bresette said in a message on Facebook that words cannot describe the pain the family feels.
In a note to his son, he wrote, "I miss and love Luke so very much. I love you Luke!"
"Ryan is especially grateful for the amazing support of the people in Birmingham. They even started a fund for the family at a bank there," Farnan said. "There are long, loving arms that stretch between Birmingham and Kansas City."
? 2013 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
WASHINGTON (AP) ? We know a lot about how babies learn to talk, and youngsters learn to read. Now scientists are unraveling the earliest building blocks of math ? and what children know about numbers as they begin first grade seems to play a big role in how well they do everyday calculations later on.
The findings have specialists considering steps that parents might take to spur math abilities, just like they do to try to raise a good reader.
This isn't only about trying to improve the nation's math scores and attract kids to become engineers. It's far more basic.
Consider: How rapidly can you calculate a tip? Do the fractions to double a recipe? Know how many quarters and dimes the cashier should hand back as your change?
About 1 in 5 adults in the U.S. lacks the math competence expected of a middle-schooler, meaning they have trouble with those ordinary tasks and aren't qualified for many of today's jobs.
"It's not just, can you do well in school? It's how well can you do in your life," says Dr. Kathy Mann Koepke of the National Institutes of Health, which is funding much of this research into math cognition. "We are in the midst of math all the time."
A new study shows trouble can start early.
University of Missouri researchers tested 180 seventh-graders. Those who lagged behind their peers in a test of core math skills needed to function as adults were the same kids who'd had the least number sense or fluency way back when they started first grade.
"The gap they started with, they don't close it," says Dr. David Geary, a cognitive psychologist who leads the study that is tracking children from kindergarten to high school in the Columbia, Mo., school system. "They're not catching up" to the kids who started ahead.
If first grade sounds pretty young to be predicting math ability, well, no one expects tots to be scribbling sums. But this number sense, or what Geary more precisely terms "number system knowledge," turns out to be a fundamental skill that students continually build on, much more than the simple ability to count.
What's involved? Understanding that numbers represent different quantities ? that three dots is the same as the numeral "3'' or the word "three." Grasping magnitude ? that 23 is bigger than 17. Getting the concept that numbers can be broken into parts ? that 5 is the same as 2 and 3, or 4 and 1. Showing on a number line that the difference between 10 and 12 is the same as the difference between 20 and 22.
Factors such as IQ and attention span didn't explain why some first-graders did better than others. Now Geary is studying if something that youngsters learn in preschool offers an advantage.
There's other evidence that math matters early in life. Numerous studies with young babies and a variety of animals show that a related ability ? to estimate numbers without counting ? is intuitive, sort of hard-wired in the brain, says Mann Koepke, of NIH's National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. That's the ability that lets you choose the shortest grocery check-out line at a glance, or that guides a bird to the bush with the most berries.
Number system knowledge is more sophisticated, and the Missouri study shows children who start elementary school without those concepts "seem to struggle enormously," says Mann Koepke, who wasn't part of that research.
While schools tend to focus on math problems around third grade, and math learning disabilities often are diagnosed by fifth grade, the new findings suggest "the need to intervene is much earlier than we ever used to think," she adds.
Exactly how to intervene still is being studied, sure to be a topic when NIH brings experts together this spring to assess what's known about math cognition.
But Geary sees a strong parallel with reading. Scientists have long known that preschoolers who know the names of letters and can better distinguish what sounds those letters make go on to read more easily. So parents today are advised to read to their children from birth, and many youngsters' books use rhyming to focus on sounds.
Likewise for math, "kids need to know number words" early on, he says.
NIH's Mann Koepke agrees, and offers some tips:
?Don't teach your toddler to count solely by reciting numbers. Attach numbers to a noun ? "Here are five crayons: One crayon, two crayons..." or say "I need to buy two yogurts" as you pick them from the store shelf ? so they'll absorb the quantity concept.
?Talk about distance: How many steps to your ball? The swing is farther away; it takes more steps.
?Describe shapes: The ellipse is round like a circle but flatter.
?As they grow, show children how math is part of daily life, as you make change, or measure ingredients, or decide how soon to leave for a destination 10 miles away,
"We should be talking to our children about magnitude, numbers, distance, shapes as soon as they're born," she contends. "More than likely, this is a positive influence on their brain function."
___
EDITOR'S NOTE ? Lauran Neergaard covers health and medical issues for The Associated Press in Washington.
During the past two weeks, family members and friends of the four men killed in Herkimer have mourned the lives lost in the tragic shootings. But amidst that sadness, the community wanted to do something to show their support. Our Cara Thomas went to the village of Mohawk where hundreds of people filled the American Legion with that idea in mind.
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MOHAWK--When tragedy and sorrow struck Herkimer County two weeks ago, community members knew from the beginning that there would be an abundance of support for the four victims' families.
"They're my neighbors. They're my friends. They live next door. And I don't care if you live in small town USA or the biggest city in the world, these things are happening today," said Ed View, a co-organizer of Sunday's benefit.
But no one, especially the family members, were expecting anything quite like this.
Louis Veazy, Mike Renshaw's future mother-in-law, said "I didn't think it would be that big but I know his own personal friends said it is going to be big on his behalf, but when you tie everything in together. It is, I think it's bigger than the Boilermaker I think to some degree."
In just a few days, volunteers pulled together a Love and Compassion Benefit, with enough food to feed an army and live bands playing all day long.
The community support exceeded all expectations so much so that a second venue was used just for the silent auction.
"People have given us items from oh let's say $50 up to $1,500 items. And there's at least 600 items and I think there's 200 certificates....I've never been involved in anything of this multitude you know," said View.
All the money donated towards the Love and Compassion Benefit will be given to the victims' families. Organizers said they expect the gifts to be fairly large, since thousands of dollars have already been donated even before Sunday's event began.
"I'd like to say thank you very much for everything you have done for our children, other families. I don't know how to exactly put it into words, but it's really appreciated," said Veazy.
Organizers of the event said they're expecting to raise tens of thousands of dollars for the families. They'll be accepting donations for another two weeks.
To donate, send checks to: Adirondack Bank c/o Love and Compassion Benefit PO Box 590 Herkimer, NY 13350
NAIROBI, Kenya (AP) ? Kenya's Supreme Court on Monday ordered a recount of votes in some constituencies in the country's March 4 presidential election.
The court heard arguments from civil society groups and the legal team of Prime Minister Raila Odinga over what they charge were failures by the election commission to conduct a free and fair election.
The court will decide Tuesday where and how the recount of votes will be done. The petitioners and the respondents are to elect 10 people each to act as observers.
Kenya's electoral commission has been accused of lack of transparency by the opposition.
The court ordered the recount of votes in 22 of the country's 291 constituencies to see if any of the tallies exceed the number of registered voters, one of the complaints from Odinga's team. The court also ordered scrutiny of the 33,400 forms which were used to record election results.
More than 12 million Kenyans on March 4 voted in the country's first presidential election since a 2007 vote sparked weeks of tribal violence that killed more than 1,000 people. Kenyan officials have pleaded with the public to not react to this year's election with violence. So far only minor instances of election-related violence have been reported.
The election commission named Uhuru Kenyatta the winner of the election with 50.07 percent of the vote. Odinga has asked the court for a new vote to be held, citing numerous failures in the vote counting and voter verification systems.
One of Odinga's lawyers, Ochieng Oduol, asked the Supreme Court to order the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission to make computer server logs available to Odinga's team.
The day after the vote, early electronic returns were broadcast on nearly every Kenyan TV station. Then, sometime around midday on March 5, the counts suddenly stopped, a problem the IEBC blamed on a crash of the computer servers.
"The server was set up to fail and there was no intention to use the electronic data transfer," Oduol said when one of the judges asked him what he intended to show the court by gaining access to the logs.
Nani Mungai, the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission lawyer, said Odinga's lawyer had "woven a conspiracy theory" around the issue of the failure of the electronic registration and data transfer systems. Mungai asked the court to dismiss the request by Odinga's team.
One theory being put forth by Odinga's team is that the stoppage of the early return count allowed Kenyatta backers to change returns on the manual tallying sheets being transported back to Nairobi. Those changes would ensure that Kenyatta would clear the 50 percent threshold needed for an outright win, alleged George Nyongesa, the chief executive of a pro-Odinga group known as FORA.
The Odinga team is asking the court to order a new vote that would allow all eight presidential candidates to again contest the presidency. Kenya's constitution says the court must rule by Saturday.
Kenya had put high hopes that the electronic registration and identification of voters would eliminate allegations of rigging that sparked off protest in 2007 which degenerated into tribe versus tribe violence in which more than 1000 people died and 600,000 were evicted from their homes.
A 2008 government report examining the 2007 electoral process found that vote counts were changed by extensive perversion of polling, probably by ballot-stuffing, organized impersonation of absent voters, vote buying and/or bribery.
A further contributor and facilitator for manipulation at polling stations is the disturbing feature that in many instances (in the strongholds of both main political parties) effectively only the majority party was represented during polling and counting, said the report by the Independent Review Commission on the Dec 27, 2007 general elections.
The report said the system of tallying, recording, transcribing, transmitting and announcing results was conceptually defective and poorly executed.
The electoral commission had long since been aware of the need to revise the system fundamentally by introducing readily available information and communications technology, said the review commission. The commission failed to put in place such a system, concluded the report: "This contributed to the climate of tension, suspicion and rumor which fanned the violence."
Mar. 25, 2013 ? For many years, some musical experts have wondered if the sound of the Stradivari and Guarneri violins might incorporate such elements of speech as vowels and consonants. A Texas A&M University researcher has now provided the first evidence that the Italian violin masters tried to impart specific vowel sounds to their violins.
Joseph Nagyvary, professor emeritus in biochemistry at Texas A&M, says of the various vowels he identified in their violins, only two were Italian -- the "i" and "e," while the others were more of French and English origin.
His findings published in the current issue of Savart Journal, a scientific journal of musical instrument acoustics, have the potential to change the way violins are made and how they are priced.
"I expected to find more Italian vowels, what experts call the 'Old Italian' sound actually has the mark of foreign languages," Nagyvary confirms.
Nagyvary has held for decades that the great Italian violin makers, Stradivari and Guarneri del Ges?, produced instruments with a more human-like tonal quality than any others made at the time. To prove his theory, he persuaded the famed violinist Itzhak Perlman to record a scale on his violin, a 1743-dated Guarneri, during a 1987 concert appearance in San Antonio.
For the required comparison, Nagyvary asked Metropolitan Opera soprano Emily Pulley, a former College Station resident, to record her voice singing vowels in an operatic style.
"It has been widely held that violins 'sing' with a female soprano voice. Emily's voice is lustrous and she has the required expertise to sing all vowels of the European languages in a musical scale," Nagyvary explains.
"I analyzed her sound samples by computer for harmonic content and then using state-of-the art phonetic analysis to obtain a 2-D map of the female soprano vowels. Each note of a musical scale on the violin underwent the same analysis, and the results were plotted and mapped against the soprano vowels."
Nagyvary's 25 years of research on the project proved that the sounds of Pulley's voice and the violin's could be located on the same map for identification purposes, and their respective graphic images can be directly compared.
His discoveries are significant for two reasons.
"For 400 years, violin prices have been based almost exclusively on the reputation of the maker -- the label inside of the violin determined the price tag," Nagyvary says. "The sound quality rarely entered into price consideration because it was deemed inaccessible. These findings could change how violins may be valued."
The new graphic images of the violin sound could also become an asset in teaching students to improve the quality of their tone production, he adds.
He says that in recent years, the violins of Guarneri del Ges? have surpassed those made by Stradivari: certain Guarneri violins now sell for something between $10 million to $20 million each.
Nagyvary was the first to prove that Stradivari and Guarneri soaked their instruments in chemicals such as borax and brine to protect them from a worm infestation that was sweeping through Italy in the 1700s. By pure accident, the chemicals used to protect the wood had the unintended result of producing the unique sounds that have been almost impossible to duplicate in the past 400 years, and his findings were supported and verified by the American Chemical Society, the world's largest scientific organization.
The retired Texas A&M professor has himself made violins that included carefully crafted woods soaked in a variety of chemicals.
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Journal Reference:
Joseph Nagyvary. A Comparative Study of Power Spectra and Vowels in Guarneri Violins and Operatic Singing. Savart Journal, Vol 1, No 3 (2013)
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