Taphonomic and Diagenetic Pathways to Protein Preservation, Part II: The Case of Brachylophosaurus canadensis Specimen MOR 2598

Recent recoveries of peptide sequences from two Cretaceous dinosaur bones require paleontologists to rethink traditional notions about how fossilization occurs. As part of this shifting paradigm, several research groups have recently begun attempting to characterize biomolecular decay and stabilization pathways in diverse paleoenvironmental and diagenetic settings. To advance these efforts, we assessed the taphonomic and geochemical history of Brachylophosaurus canadensis specimen MOR 2598, the left femur of which was previously found to retain endogenous cells, tissues, and structural proteins. Combined stratigraphic and trace element data show that after brief fluvial transport, this articulated hind limb was buried in a sandy, likely-brackish, estuarine channel. During early diagenesis, percolating groundwaters stagnated within the bones, forming reducing internal microenvironments. Recent exposure and weathering also caused the surficial leaching of trace elements from the specimen. Despite these shifting redox regimes, proteins within the bones were able to survive through diagenesis, attesting to their remarkable resiliency over geologic time. Synthesizing our findings with other recent studies reveals that oxidizing conditions in the initial ~48 h postmortem likely promote molecular stabilization reactions and that the retention of early-diagenetic trace element signatures may be a useful proxy for molecular recovery potential

What am I allowed to do here?: Online Learning of Context-Specific Norms by Pepper

Social norms support coordination and cooperation in society. With social robots becoming increasingly involved in our society, they also need to follow the social norms of the society. This paper presents a computational framework for learning contexts and the social norms present in a context in an online manner on a robot. The paper utilizes a recent state-of-the-art approach for incremental learning and adapts it for online learning of scenes (contexts). The paper further utilizes Dempster-Schafer theory to model context-specific norms. After learning the scenes (contexts), we use active learning to learn related norms. We test our approach on the Pepper robot by taking it through different scene locations. Our results show that Pepper can learn different scenes and related norms simply by communicating with a human partner in an online manner.Comment: The final authenticated publication is available online at https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-62056-1_1

Risk in daily newspaper coverage of red tide blooms in Southwest Florida

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from the publisher via the DOI in this record.This study investigated newspaper coverage of Florida red tide blooms in four metropolitan areas of Southwest Florida during a 25-year period, 1987–2012. We focused on how journalists framed red tide stories with respect to environmental risk, health risk, and economic risk. We determined risk to be a key factor in this news coverage, being an aspect of coverage of red tide itself in terms of environmental risk, tourism risk, and public health risk. The study found that red tide news coverage is most often framed as an environmental story.This work was funded by National Science Foundation (NSF) Award #1009106 (CNH); the National Institute for Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) Award #R21ES017413-01A2; and by European Regional Development Fund and the European Social Fund