The disruption of a keystone interaction erodes pollination and seed dispersal networks

Understanding the impacts of global change on ecological communities is a major challenge in modern ecology. The gain or loss of particular species and the disruption of key interactions are both consequences and drivers of global change that can lead to the disassembly of ecological networks. We examined whether the disruption of a hummingbird–mistletoe–marsupial mutualism by the invasion of non-native species can have cascading effects on both pollination and seed dispersal networks in the temperate forest of Patagonia, Argentina. We focused on network motifs, subnetworks composed of a small number of species exhibiting particular patterns of interaction, to examine the structure and diversity of mutualistic networks. We found that the hummingbird–mistletoe–marsupial mutualism plays a critical role in the community by increasing the complexity of pollination and seed dispersal networks through supporting a high diversity of interactions. Moreover, we found that the disruption of this tripartite mutualism by non-native ungulates resulted in diverse indirect effects that led to less complex pollination and seed dispersal networks. Our results demonstrate that the gains and losses of particular species and the alteration of key interactions can lead to cascading effects in the community through the disassembly of mutualistic networks.Fil: Vitali, Agustín. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - Patagonia Norte. Instituto de Investigaciones en Biodiversidad y Medioambiente. Universidad Nacional del Comahue. Centro Regional Universidad Bariloche. Instituto de Investigaciones en Biodiversidad y Medioambiente; ArgentinaFil: Sasal, Yamila. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - Patagonia Norte. Instituto de Investigaciones en Biodiversidad y Medioambiente. Universidad Nacional del Comahue. Centro Regional Universidad Bariloche. Instituto de Investigaciones en Biodiversidad y Medioambiente; ArgentinaFil: Vazquez, Diego P.. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - Mendoza. Instituto Argentino de Investigaciones de las Zonas Áridas. Provincia de Mendoza. Instituto Argentino de Investigaciones de las Zonas Áridas. Universidad Nacional de Cuyo. Instituto Argentino de Investigaciones de las Zonas Áridas; ArgentinaFil: Miguel, María Florencia. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - Mendoza. Instituto Argentino de Investigaciones de las Zonas Áridas. Provincia de Mendoza. Instituto Argentino de Investigaciones de las Zonas Áridas. Universidad Nacional de Cuyo. Instituto Argentino de Investigaciones de las Zonas Áridas; ArgentinaFil: Rodriguez Cabal, Mariano Alberto. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - Patagonia Norte. Instituto de Investigaciones en Biodiversidad y Medioambiente. Universidad Nacional del Comahue. Centro Regional Universidad Bariloche. Instituto de Investigaciones en Biodiversidad y Medioambiente; Argentina. University Of Vermont. Rubenstein School.; Estados Unido

Surface damaging of brass and steel pins when sliding over nitrided samples cut by finishing and roughing EDM conditions

In the forging industry, surface quality and surface treatments of dies are crucial parameters to extend their life. These components are usually machined by milling or by Electrical Discharge Machining (EDM), and the final surface roughness depends on the machining techniques and operational conditions used in its fabrication. After milling, a nitriding treatment is widely applied to extend its service life. Nevertheless, no scientific report that informs about nitriding after EDM has been found. Accordingly, this work focuses on the wear and friction behavior of pins made of brass and medium carbon steel sliding over AISI H13 discs, made by wire EDM in the conditions of finishing and roughing. The discs are plasma nitride, and their effect on the wear during pin-ondisc tests is evaluated. In this sense, the analysis of the surface damage for the different pins will help us to understand the service life and wear evolution of the forging dies. The results show that plasma nitride reduces the friction and prevents the degradation of the pin, independently of the material of the pin, when sliding over finishing and roughing EDM conditions.This work is supported by the National Agency for Research and Development of Chile (ANID)— grant number: 3180006 and the Serra Húnter program (Generalitat de Catalunya)—reference number UPC-LE304 (2018).Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version

Deep Learning for real-time neural decoding of grasp

Neural decoding involves correlating signals acquired from the brain to variables in the physical world like limb movement or robot control in Brain Machine Interfaces. In this context, this work starts from a specific pre-existing dataset of neural recordings from monkey motor cortex and presents a Deep Learning-based approach to the decoding of neural signals for grasp type classification. Specifically, we propose here an approach that exploits LSTM networks to classify time series containing neural data (i.e., spike trains) into classes representing the object being grasped. The main goal of the presented approach is to improve over state-of-the-art decoding accuracy without relying on any prior neuroscience knowledge, and leveraging only the capability of deep learning models to extract correlations from data. The paper presents the results achieved for the considered dataset and compares them with previous works on the same dataset, showing a significant improvement in classification accuracy, even if considering simulated real-time decoding

Nanomedicine Approaches for the Pulmonary Treatment of Cystic Fibrosis

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The site-specific primary calibration conditions for the Brewer spectrophotometer

The Brewer ozone spectrophotometer (the Brewer) is one of the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) Global Atmosphere Watch (GAW)’s standard ozone-monitoring instruments since the 1980s. The entire global Brewer ozone-monitoring network is operated and maintained via a hierarchical calibration chain, which started from world reference instruments that are independently calibrated via the primary calibration method (PCM) at a premium site (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) Mauna Loa Observatory, Hawaii). These world reference instruments have been maintained by Environment and Climate Change Canada (ECCC) in Toronto for the last 4 decades. Their calibration is transferred to the travelling standard instrument and then to network (field) Brewer instruments at their monitoring sites (all via the calibration transfer method; CTM)

Psychiatric disorder as clinical presentation of primary Sjögren's syndrome: two case reports

Psychiatric disorders in primary Sjögren's syndrome constitute a possible clinical reality that each practitioner must be able to recognise and treat. In this article, two case reports of mental disorder as clinical presentation of primary Sjögren's syndrome are presented, suggesting that psychiatric manifestations in primary Sjögren's syndrome can occur not only during its longitudinal course, but also at the onset of the autoimmune syndrome. A better adapted prescription of corticosteroids and/or immunosuppressive agents (together with specific psychotropic treatments) can induce rapid relief of mental symptoms