The Course of Habituation of the Proboscis Extension Reflex Can Be Predicted by Sucrose Responsiveness in Drosophila

The proboscis extension reflex (PER) is triggered when insects’ gustatory receptors contact appetitive stimuli, so it provides a behavioral readout for perceptual encoding of tastants. Research on the experience dependent modulation of PER in Drosophila has been hindered by the difficulty of obtaining reliable measures of memory-driven change in PER probability in the background of larger changes induced by physiological state. In this study, we showed that the course of PER habituation can be predicted by the degree of sucrose responsiveness in Drosophila. We assessed early response parameters, including the number of proboscis extensions and labellar movements in the first five trials, the trial to start responding, and the trial to make the first stop to quantify responsiveness, which predicted the upcoming pattern of both the short-term and 1 hour memory of PER habituation for individual flies. The cAMP signaling pathway mutant rutabaga displayed deficits in attunement of perceptual salience of sucrose to physiological demands and stimulus-driven sensitization

Pig domestication and human-mediated dispersal in western eurasia revealed through ancient DNA and geometric morphometrics

Zooarcheological evidence suggests that pigs were domesticated in Southwest Asia ∼8,500 BC. They then spread across the Middle and Near East and westward into Europe alongside early agriculturalists. European pigs were either domesticated independently or more likely appeared so as a result of admixture between introduced pigs and European wild boar. As a result, European wild boar mtDNA lineages replaced Near Eastern/Anatolian mtDNA signatures in Europe and subsequently replaced indigenous domestic pig lineages in Anatolia. The specific details of these processes, however, remain unknown. To address questions related to early pig domestication, dispersal, and turnover in the Near East, we analyzed ancient mitochondrial DNA and dental geometric morphometric variation in 393 ancient pig specimens representing 48 archeological sites (from the Pre-Pottery Neolithic to the Medieval period) from Armenia, Cyprus, Georgia, Iran, Syria, and Turkey. Our results reveal the first genetic signatures of early domestic pigs in the Near Eastern Neolithic core zone. We also demonstrate that these early pigs differed genetically from those in western Anatolia that were introduced to Europe during the Neolithic expansion. In addition, we present a significantly more refined chronology for the introduction of European domestic pigs into Asia Minor that took place during the Bronze Age, at least 900 years earlier than previously detected. By the 5th century AD, European signatures completely replaced the endemic lineages possibly coinciding with the widespread demographic and societal changes that occurred during the Anatolian Bronze and Iron Ages

Design and implementation of an FPGA-based parallel graphics renderer for displaying CSG surfaces and volumes

In this paper, the design and implementation of a high-speed "CSG renderer" for displaying convex and concave objects and its performance analysis are presented. The renderer comprises a binary tree-structured depth generator that produces the depth values of a plane at each pixel on the display window simultaneously, and pipelined pixel processors that processes the depth values, a corner bender, and a frame-buffer. In this work, constructive solid geometry (CSG) scene models are used to simplify the hidden area removal and object interference testing. The field programmable gate array technology is used in the implementation. © 2003 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved

An automated perspective-projected view module for pixel-based csg renderers

The generation of 3D solid objects, and more generally solid geometric modelling, is very important in Computer Aided Design (CAD). This paper presents a simple but effective algorithm for automated display of perspective views of Constructive Solid Geometry (CSG) scene models. This algorithm can be implemented as a module in such a way that it is easily integrated, without any modification, to the present systems of “pixel-based Z-Buffer” CSG renderers. An implementation of the algorithm for such a system is also given in the paper. © 2008 TSI® Press

Accelerating volume rendering by ray leaping with back steps

PubMedID: 19541384The methods for visualizing sampled spatial scientific data are known as volume rendering, where images are generated by computing 2D projections of 3D volume data. Since all the discrete data cells participate in the generation of each image, rendering time grows linearly with the resolution and complexity of the dataset. Empty cells in the data, which do not contribute to the final image, are of the important factors that increase the rendering time. During recent years, researchers have highly concentrated on improving the performance of these methods to achieve real time rendering. Skipping the empty space provides significant speedup and known as space leaping which requires implementation of special data structures and pre-processing. This paper presents a simple and efficient technique, that we name "ray-leaping," for the acceleration of total rendering process and eliminates the need for special data structures and pre-processing. © 2009 Elsevier Ireland Ltd. All rights reserved

Implementation of Target Tracking Methods on Images Taken from Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

17th IEEE World Symposium on Applied Machine Intelligence and Informatics, SAMI 2019 --24 January 2019 through 26 January 2019 -- --Traditional object detection algorithms generate proposals and implement feature extraction. Then, a classification algorithm is implemented to label object classes. This process is slow, and the accuracy may not be adequate for UAV's real-time application tasks due to their movement in the air. We specified and practically implemented an object detection and localization scheme on images taken from a UAV, and provided the UAV with an advanced vision. We used YOLOv2 model. The YOLOv2 is a suitable object detection approach based on deep learning, and it presents a network architecture with accurate results in high speed. The object detection and localization were successfully implemented for people, car, and motorcycle classes within the threshold confidence scores. We pre-trained the model on COCO dataset and tested the model with our test images. The confidence scores were higher in altitudes from 5 to 15 meters and the confidence scores varied between %45 - %79 mAP. © 2019 IEEE

Measurement of the mass attenuation coefficients and electron densities for BiPbSrCaCuO superconductor at different energies

The mass attenuation coefficients for Bi, Pb, Sr, Ca, Cu metals, Bi2O3, PbO, SrCO3, CaO, CuO compounds and solid-state forms of Bi1.7Pb0.3Sr2Ca2Cu3O10 superconductor were determined at 57.5, 65.2, 77.1, 87.3, 94.6, 122 and 136 keV energies. The samples were irradiated using a 57Co point source emitted 122 and 136 keV ?-ray energies. The X-ray energies were obtained using secondary targets such as Ta, Bi2O3 and (CH3COO)2UO22H2O. The ?- and X-rays were counted by a Si(Li) detector with a resolution of 0.16 keV at 5.9 keV. The effect of absorption edges on electron density, effective atomic numbers and their variation with photon energy in composite superconductor samples was discussed. Obtained values were compared with theoretical values. © 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved