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"Barber, A"
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A house in the sun : modern architecture and solar energy in the Cold War
\"'A House in the Sun' describes a number of solar house experiments in the 1940s and 1950s. The houses relied on the materials and ideas of modern architecture for both energy efficiency and claims to cultural relevance, and also developed out of a growing concern over global resource limits\"--Provided by publisher.
Book
Restoration of vision after transplantation of photoreceptors
Transplanted rod precursor cells restore visual function, from electrophysiology to behaviour, after transplantation into a mouse model of congenital night blindness.
Photoreceptor restoration
Previous work has shown that retinal precursor cells can be transplanted successfully into degenerating retinas in mice, but evidence for improvement of vision has been lacking. Now Pearson
et al
. take a step forward in demonstrating the feasibility of this strategy for restoring vision. Using an improved transplantation protocol for introducing rod precursor cells into the retinas of mice that lack rods, the authors demonstrate that the transplanted cells integrate into and position correctly in the existing network, and that visual function, from electrophysiology to behaviour, is enhanced in the transplant recipients. The study provides important support for the further development of stem-cell therapy for retinal degeneration.
Cell transplantation is a potential strategy for treating blindness caused by the loss of photoreceptors. Although transplanted rod-precursor cells are able to migrate into the adult retina and differentiate to acquire the specialized morphological features of mature photoreceptor cells
1
, the fundamental question remains whether transplantation of photoreceptor cells can actually improve vision. Here we provide evidence of functional rod-mediated vision after photoreceptor transplantation in adult
Gnat1
−/−
mice, which lack rod function and are a model of congenital stationary night blindness
2
. We show that transplanted rod precursors form classic triad synaptic connections with second-order bipolar and horizontal cells in the recipient retina. The newly integrated photoreceptor cells are light-responsive with dim-flash kinetics similar to adult wild-type photoreceptors. By using intrinsic imaging under scotopic conditions we demonstrate that visual signals generated by transplanted rods are projected to higher visual areas, including V1. Moreover, these cells are capable of driving optokinetic head tracking and visually guided behaviour in the
Gnat1
−/−
mouse under scotopic conditions. Together, these results demonstrate the feasibility of photoreceptor transplantation as a therapeutic strategy for restoring vision after retinal degeneration.
Journal Article
Budapest
\"Designed for the traveler who wants to understand more fully what he or she sees. Blue Guides have been published continuously since 1918 and are the most comprehensive travel guides concentrating on history, architecture and art. This guide to Budapest, perhaps the most beautiful of the Central European capitals, covers the city in meticulous detail. The depth of information and quality of research make this book the best guide for the independent cultural traveller. With high-quality maps from Blue Guides' award-winning cartography series, detailed plans, photos and illustrations, and full coverage of places to stay and eat.\"--Amazon.com.
Book
The Processing of Human Emotional Faces by Pet and Lab Dogs: Evidence for Lateralization and Experience Effects
From all non-human animals dogs are very likely the best decoders of human behavior. In addition to a high sensitivity to human attentive status and to ostensive cues, they are able to distinguish between individual human faces and even between human facial expressions. However, so far little is known about how they process human faces and to what extent this is influenced by experience. Here we present an eye-tracking study with dogs emanating from two different living environments and varying experience with humans: pet and lab dogs. The dogs were shown pictures of familiar and unfamiliar human faces expressing four different emotions. The results, extracted from several different eye-tracking measurements, revealed pronounced differences in the face processing of pet and lab dogs, thus indicating an influence of the amount of exposure to humans. In addition, there was some evidence for the influences of both, the familiarity and the emotional expression of the face, and strong evidence for a left gaze bias. These findings, together with recent evidence for the dog's ability to discriminate human facial expressions, indicate that dogs are sensitive to some emotions expressed in human faces.
Journal Article
Lombardy, Milan & the Italian Lakes
'Blue Guides', now in their centenary year, have been published continuously since 1918 and are the most comprehensive travel guides concentrating on history, architecture, and art. This guide to Lombardy, with full coverage of the major city of Milan, also takes in Lakes Maggiore, Como, and Garda as well as the historically and artistically rich towns of Cremona, Bergamo, Mantua, Brescia, and Pavia.
Book
Target-group backgrounds prove effective at correcting sampling bias in Maxent models
Aim Accounting for sampling bias is the greatest challenge facing presence‐only and presence‐background species distribution models; no matter what type of model is chosen, using biased data will mask the true relationship between occurrences and environmental predictors. To address this issue, we review four established bias correction techniques, using empirical occurrences with known sampling effort, and virtual species with known distributions. Innovation Occurrence data come from a national recording scheme of hoverflies (Syrphidae) in Great Britain, spanning 1983–2002. Target‐group backgrounds, distance‐restricted backgrounds, travel time to cities and human population density were used to account for sampling bias in 58 species of hoverfly. Distributions generated by bias correction techniques were compared in geographical space to the distribution produced accounting for known sampling effort, using Schoener's distance, centroid shifts and range size changes. To validate our results, we performed the same comparisons using 50 randomly generated virtual species. We used sampling effort from the hoverfly recording scheme to structure our biased sampling regime, emulating complex real‐life sampling bias. Main conclusions Models made without any correction typically produced distributions that mapped sampling effort rather than the underlying habitat suitability. Target‐group backgrounds performed the best at emulating sampling effort and unbiased virtual occurrences, but also showed signs of overcompensation in places. Other methods performed better than no‐correction, but often differences were difficult to visually detect. In line with previous studies, when sampling effort is unknown, target‐group backgrounds provide a useful tool for reducing the effect of sampling bias. Models should be visually inspected for biological realism to identify any areas of potential overcompensation. Given the disparity between corrected and un‐corrected models, sampling bias constitutes a major source of error in species distribution modelling, and more research is needed to confidently address the issue.
Journal Article
Rome
Over 30 detailed walks to every corner of this celebrated city are accompanied by a colour street map and numerous plans of the sites, churches and museums. For day trips out of Rome, there are descriptions of Ostia Antica, Tivoli and Hadrian's Villa. The practical information section covers all essentials.
Book
Climate and ecology predict latitudinal trends in sexual selection inferred from avian mating systems
Sexual selection, one of the central pillars of evolutionary theory, has powerful effects on organismal morphology, behaviour, and population dynamics. However, current knowledge about geographical variation in this evolutionary mechanism and its underlying drivers remains highly incomplete, in part because standardised data on the strength of sexual selection is sparse even for well-studied organisms. Here, we use information on mating systems—including the incidence of polygamy and extra-pair paternity—to estimate the intensity of sexual selection in 10,671 (>99.9%) bird species distributed worldwide. We show that avian sexual selection varies latitudinally, peaking at higher latitudes, although the gradient is reversed in the world’s most sexually selected birds—specialist frugivores—which are strongly associated with tropical forests. Phylogenetic models further reveal that the strength of sexual selection is explained by temperature seasonality coupled with a suite of climate-associated factors, including migration, diet, and territoriality. Overall, these analyses suggest that climatic conditions leading to short, intense breeding seasons, or highly abundant and patchy food resources, increase the potential for polygamy in birds, driving latitudinal gradients in sexual selection. Our findings help to resolve longstanding debates about spatial variation in evolutionary mechanisms linked to reproductive biology and also provide a comprehensive species-level data set for further studies of selection and phenotypic evolution in the context of global climatic change.
Journal Article
Phrase Frequency Effects in Language Production
A classic debate in the psychology of language concerns the question of the grain-size of the linguistic information that is stored in memory. One view is that only morphologically simple forms are stored (e.g., 'car', 'red'), and that more complex forms of language such as multi-word phrases (e.g., 'red car') are generated on-line from the simple forms. In two experiments we tested this view. In Experiment 1, participants produced noun+adjective and noun+noun phrases that were elicited by experimental displays consisting of colored line drawings and two superimposed line drawings. In Experiment 2, participants produced noun+adjective and determiner+noun+adjective utterances elicited by colored line drawings. In both experiments, naming latencies decreased with increasing frequency of the multi-word phrase, and were unaffected by the frequency of the object name in the utterance. These results suggest that the language system is sensitive to the distribution of linguistic information at grain-sizes beyond individual words.
Journal Article