scholarly journals Making a stronger case for comparative research to investigate the behavioral and neurological bases of three-dimensional navigation

2013 ◽  
Vol 36 (5) ◽  
pp. 557-558 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniele Nardi ◽  
Verner P. Bingman

AbstractThe rich diversity of avian natural history provides exciting possibilities for comparative research aimed at understanding three-dimensional navigation. We propose some hypotheses relating differences in natural history to potential behavioral and neurological adaptations possessed by contrasting bird species. This comparative approach may offer unique insights into some of the important questions raised by Jeffery et al.

2016 ◽  
Vol 12 (9) ◽  
pp. 20160492 ◽  
Author(s):  
Xi-Guang Zhang ◽  
Martin R. Smith ◽  
Jie Yang ◽  
Jin-Bo Hou

The restricted, exclusively terrestrial distribution of modern Onychophora contrasts strikingly with the rich diversity of onychophoran-like fossils preserved in marine Cambrian Lagerstätten . The transition from these early forebears to the modern onychophoran body plan is poorly constrained, in part owing to the absence of fossils preserving details of the soft anatomy. Here, we report muscle tissue in a new early Cambrian (Stage 3) lobopodian, Tritonychus phanerosarkus gen. et sp. nov., preserved in the Orsten fashion by three-dimensional replication in phosphate. This first report of Palaeozoic onychophoran musculature establishes peripheral musculature as a characteristic of the ancestral panarthropod, but documents an unexpected muscular configuration. Phylogenetic analysis reconstructs T. phanerosarkus as one of a few members of the main onychophoran lineage—which was as rare and as cryptic in the Cambrian period as it is today.


The Condor ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 122 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Philip C Stouffer

Abstract For decades, ecologists have studied fundamental questions of how Amazonian biodiversity is maintained, and whether that diversity can persist following deforestation. The long history of avian research at the Biological Dynamics of Forest Fragments Project, near Manaus, Brazil, has helped advance this understanding in the context of a broader research program focused on rainforest fragments embedded in a dynamic matrix. By sampling birds beginning before fragments were isolated, in the late 1970s, and continuing the protocol to the present, our work has revealed community dynamics driven not just by area and isolation, but also by larger landscape patterns, particularly second growth recovery over decadal scales. Fragments permanently lose some bird species, but their communities need not follow a trajectory toward catastrophic change. Our challenge now is to determine under what conditions remnant patches and developing second growth can support not just the rich diversity of Amazonian rainforest species but also their population processes and emergent community properties.


Author(s):  
Stefan Winter

This concluding chapter summarizes key themes and presents some final thoughts. The book has shown that the multiplicity of lived ʻAlawi experiences cannot be reduced to the sole question of religion or framed within a monolithic narrative of persecution; that the very attempt to outline a single coherent history of “the ʻAlawis” may indeed be misguided. The sources on which this study has drawn are considerably more accessible, and the social and administrative realities they reflect consistently more mundane and disjointed, than the discourse of the ʻAlawis' supposed exceptionalism would lead one to believe. Therefore, the challenge for historians of ʻAlawi society in Syria and elsewhere is not to use the specific events and structures these sources detail to merely add to the already existing metanarratives of religious oppression, Ottoman misrule, and national resistance but rather to come to a newer and more intricate understanding of that community, and its place in wider Middle Eastern society, by investigating the lives of individual ʻAlawi (and other) actors within the rich diversity of local contexts these sources reveal.


2018 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 112-119
Author(s):  
VLADIMIR GLEB NAYDONOV

The article considers the students’ tolerance as a spectrum of personal manifestations of respect, acceptance and correct understanding of the rich diversity of cultures of the world, values of others’ personality. The purpose of the study is to investgate education and the formation of tolerance among the students. We have compiled a training program to improve the level of tolerance for interethnic differences. Based on the statistical analysis of the data obtained, the most important values that are significant for different levels of tolerance were identified.


Author(s):  
Jonathan Hopkin

Recent elections in the advanced Western democracies have undermined the basic foundations of political systems that had previously beaten back all challenges—from both the Left and the Right. The election of Donald Trump to the US presidency, only months after the United Kingdom voted to leave the European Union, signaled a dramatic shift in the politics of the rich democracies. This book traces the evolution of this shift and argues that it is a long-term result of abandoning the postwar model of egalitarian capitalism in the 1970s. That shift entailed weakening the democratic process in favor of an opaque, technocratic form of governance that allows voters little opportunity to influence policy. With the financial crisis of the late 2000s, these arrangements became unsustainable, as incumbent politicians were unable to provide solutions to economic hardship. Electorates demanded change, and it had to come from outside the system. Using a comparative approach, the text explains why different kinds of anti-system politics emerge in different countries and how political and economic factors impact the degree of electoral instability that emerges. Finally, it discusses the implications of these changes, arguing that the only way for mainstream political forces to survive is for them to embrace a more activist role for government in protecting societies from economic turbulence.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Valentin Waschulin ◽  
Chiara Borsetto ◽  
Robert James ◽  
Kevin K. Newsham ◽  
Stefano Donadio ◽  
...  

AbstractThe growing problem of antibiotic resistance has led to the exploration of uncultured bacteria as potential sources of new antimicrobials. PCR amplicon analyses and short-read sequencing studies of samples from different environments have reported evidence of high biosynthetic gene cluster (BGC) diversity in metagenomes, indicating their potential for producing novel and useful compounds. However, recovering full-length BGC sequences from uncultivated bacteria remains a challenge due to the technological restraints of short-read sequencing, thus making assessment of BGC diversity difficult. Here, long-read sequencing and genome mining were used to recover >1400 mostly full-length BGCs that demonstrate the rich diversity of BGCs from uncultivated lineages present in soil from Mars Oasis, Antarctica. A large number of highly divergent BGCs were not only found in the phyla Acidobacteriota, Verrucomicrobiota and Gemmatimonadota but also in the actinobacterial classes Acidimicrobiia and Thermoleophilia and the gammaproteobacterial order UBA7966. The latter furthermore contained a potential novel family of RiPPs. Our findings underline the biosynthetic potential of underexplored phyla as well as unexplored lineages within seemingly well-studied producer phyla. They also showcase long-read metagenomic sequencing as a promising way to access the untapped genetic reservoir of specialised metabolite gene clusters of the uncultured majority of microbes.


2012 ◽  
Vol 279 (1742) ◽  
pp. 3520-3526 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brian Tilston Smith ◽  
Amei Amei ◽  
John Klicka

Climatic and geological changes across time are presumed to have shaped the rich biodiversity of tropical regions. However, the impact climatic drying and subsequent tropical rainforest contraction had on speciation has been controversial because of inconsistent palaeoecological and genetic data. Despite the strong interest in examining the role of climatic change on speciation in the Neotropics there has been few comparative studies, particularly, those that include non-rainforest taxa. We used bird species that inhabit humid or dry habitats that dispersed across the Panamanian Isthmus to characterize temporal and spatial patterns of speciation across this barrier. Here, we show that these two assemblages of birds exhibit temporally different speciation time patterns that supports multiple cycles of speciation. Evidence for these cycles is further corroborated by the finding that both assemblages consist of ‘young’ and ‘old’ species, despite dry habitat species pairs being geographically more distant than pairs of humid habitat species. The matrix of humid and dry habitats in the tropics not only allows for the maintenance of high species richness, but additionally this study suggests that these environments may have promoted speciation. We conclude that differentially expanding and contracting distributions of dry and humid habitats was probably an important contributor to speciation in the tropics.


Science ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 341 (6147) ◽  
pp. 746-751 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeffery L. Dangl ◽  
Diana M. Horvath ◽  
Brian J. Staskawicz

Diverse and rapidly evolving pathogens cause plant diseases and epidemics that threaten crop yield and food security around the world. Research over the last 25 years has led to an increasingly clear conceptual understanding of the molecular components of the plant immune system. Combined with ever-cheaper DNA-sequencing technology and the rich diversity of germ plasm manipulated for over a century by plant breeders, we now have the means to begin development of durable (long-lasting) disease resistance beyond the limits imposed by conventional breeding and in a manner that will replace costly and unsustainable chemical controls.


This exciting new Handbook offers a comprehensive overview of the contemporary state of the field. The editors’ introduction and forty-five essays cover feminist critical engagements with philosophy and adjacent scholarly fields, as well as feminist approaches to current debates and crises across the world. Authors cover topics ranging from the ways in which feminist philosophy attends to other systems of oppression, and the gendered, racialized, and classed assumptions embedded in philosophical concepts, to feminist perspectives on prominent subfields of philosophy. The first section contains chapters that explore feminist philosophical engagement with mainstream and marginalized histories and traditions, while the second section parses feminist philosophy’s contributions to with numerous philosophical subfields, for example metaphysics and bioethics. A third section explores what feminist philosophy can illuminate about crucial moral and political issues of identity, gender, the body, autonomy, prisons, among numerous others. The Handbook concludes with the field’s engagement with other theories and movements, including trans studies, queer theory, critical race, theory, postcolonial theory, and decolonial theory. The volume provides a rigorous but accessible resource for students and scholars who are interested in feminist philosophy, and how feminist philosophers situate their work in relation to the philosophical mainstream and other disciplines. Above all it aims to showcase the rich diversity of subject matter, approach, and method among feminist philosophers.


2016 ◽  
Vol 8 (3) ◽  
pp. 360-369
Author(s):  
Devi A.G. PRASAD ◽  
Shwetha BHARATHI

Sacred groves are one of the finest examples of informal way of conserving the forest wealth. Baseline data collection of their diversity, distribution and regeneration capacity becomes necessary for the management and conservation of these undisturbed forest patches. In this context, the present investigation was carried out using random quadrat method in the sacred groves of Virajpet, Karnataka, India. A total of 132 tree species belonging to 113 genera and 45 families were identified within five sacred groves. Higher basal area (51.73-85.65 m2/ha) and tree density (453.33-515.9 individuals/ha) were observed as compared to other forests of Western Ghats region. The present investigation has revealed a healthy regeneration of tree species. Seedling and sapling composition differed to some extent from the mature tree species composition which could be used in predicting the future possibilities. Protection and conservation of such sacred groves should be of interest, for better regeneration of the rich diversity they harbour.


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