How fishing cats Prionailurus viverrinus Bennett, 1833 fish: describing a felid’s strategy to hunt aquatic prey

The fishing cat’s persistence in a ‘semi-aquatic niche’ suggests the evolution of a successful hunting strategy. We describe it for the first time by analysing 197 camera-trap video-clips, collected from a participatory-science initiative, within an ethogram framework. The cats spent ∼52% of the time sitting and waiting for prey (fishes) to come nearer and took limited attempts to hunt (3.89%) in deeper waters (in which the upper portions of the cat’s body were submerged), where its hunting success was found to be 42.86%. In shallow waters, it adopted a predominantly active mode of hunting (∼96%) to flush out prey.

Self, Free Will and Compassion: Shared Constructs in Neuroscience and Buddhism

The authors, a neuroscientist and a Buddhist monastic who met through the Emory Tibet Science Initiative, highlight similarities in the understanding of mental activities found in both traditions. An important principle discovered is the parallel processing of multiple mental activities, which reveals the existence of a unitary self and free will as illusions. These insights provide the rationale in Buddhism to develop a culture of compassion. Meanwhile western psychology and neuroscience have found brain circuits that have evolved to support social and even altruistic behaviors, giving compassion a physical basis in our brains as well. These insights then set the stage for a shared interest in an altruistic compassionate society.

Translating Monastic Lessons to Teaching Undergraduate Biology

My participation in the Emory Tibet Science Initiative (ETSI) has afforded me considerable means to enrich my teaching at the undergraduate level. Here, I discuss how I translated lessons learned from working with Tibetan Monks to teaching in a primarily undergraduate institution, including: 1) introducing each course with a challenge to the assumptions made as “Western scientists” 2) using the unique monastic pedagogy of debate to facilitate classroom scholarship, and 3) embracing compassion as a central tenet to engage and empower student learning, which has become the cornerstone of my teaching philosophy. In addition, I brought undergraduates with me to participate in ETSI, and the experience had a profound effect on their educational and career paths. These experiences with the Tibetan monks transformed my teaching and continue to inform how I approach undergraduate education.

Tibetan Monastics Reflect on Science and Buddhism: (I) The Basic Human Nature and (II) Subatomic Particles

One of the goals of the historic Emory-Tibet Science Initiative (ETSI) is to catalyze cross-cultural thinking among scientists and Buddhists. Over a decade into the project to elicit such thinking the project sponsored an essay competition among the monastics. Here we feature two of the winners reflecting on different aspects of western sciences and Buddhism, physics and Buddhism respectively, demonstrating how modern science is integrating with the monastics’ traditional training and culture. A key aspect of ETSI is also translation, and these essays, in that spirit were translated from Tibetan to English by one of the project translators.

Occurrence of Aedes cretinus in Cyprus based on information collected by citizen scientists

The current study presents a success story where through a small network of citizen scientists original information regarding the occurrence of Aedes cretinus was received, suggesting the absence of invasive Aedes species on the island of Cyprus. Citizen science records show that Ae. cretinus most likely has an island wide spatial distribution while its seasonal activity is limited to the spring and summer months. Data collected by citizen scientists under ‘The Three Mosquiteers’ citizen science initiative, provided more records than any efforts from the authorities in the last 73 years. The future success and the longevity of this initiative will be strongly dependent on the in-depth engagement and collaboration between local experts in entomology and citizen scientists.

Language, Truth, and Pedagogy

Early in the planning the Emory-Tibet Science Initiative, we realized that the encounter between Buddhism and contemporary science demanded that Buddhist logic and epistemology encounter Anglophone philosophy of science. A titanic clash of world views was anticipated, but as we began the conversation, we found something different. Many philosophical concerns were shared, but these problems were understood differently. While fundamental elements of epistemology, like observation and inference, had similar functions in both traditions, subtle differences in conceptualization challenged mutual intelligibility. Through thousands of years of erudite debate, each tradition had honed their tools. While each cut cleanly, they carved in different joints. This essay will briefly discuss the linguistic, philosophical, and pedagogical adjustments that made for mutual comprehensibility.

A striking sexually dimorphic new species of Castolus (Hemiptera: Heteroptera: Reduviidae) from Colombia, with new records from Neotropical countries and taxonomic notes on the genus

The New World genus Castolus Stål, 1858 (Hemiptera: Heteroptera: Reduviidae) contains 16 described species. Based on material from northern Colombia we describe Castolus rafaeli sp. nov., and key all known species. The following new synonyms are proposed: Castolus nigriventris Breddin, 1904 = C. bicolor Maldonado, 1976, syn. nov.; and C. subinermis (Stål, 1862) = C. annulatus Maldonado & Brailovsky, 1992, syn. nov. = Mucrolicter alienus Elkins, 1962, syn. nov. Because M. alienus is the type species of the currently monotypic genus Mucrolicter Elkins, 1962, the proposed synonymy results in the following generic synonym: Castolus Stål, 1858 = Mucrolicter Elkins, 1962, syn. nov. New country records are provided for two species: Castolus plagiaticollis Stål, 1858 is recorded new for Colombia; and Castolus rufomarginatus Champion, 1899 for Costa Rica, Colombia, and Ecuador. Additional localities are provided for species from Colombia and other Neotropical countries based on both specimens from entomological collections and observations from the citizen science initiative iNaturalist.

How do Brazilian Software Engineering Researchers Perceive and Practice Open Science?

With the wide popularization and increasing adoption of Open Science, most scientific research areas have discussed its benefits to the overall society represented by any citizen. The openness process aims at promoting free availability of such researches, thus directly impacting scientific evolution. Researchers are encouraged to make scientific research artifacts open for every citizen. In the Software Engineering area we are currently experiencing international Open Science initiatives, such as the ICSE Rose Festival, the ESEM Open Science policies, and the Empirical Software Engineering journal Open Science initiative. However, a little is known about Open Science in the Brazilian Software Engineering community. Therefore, in this paper, we present and discuss the results of a survey on how do our software engineering community perceive and practice Open Science.