Persistent anthrax as a major driver of wildlife mortality in a tropical rainforest

Anthrax is a globally important animal disease and zoonosis. Despite this, our current knowledge of anthrax ecology is largely limited to arid ecosystems, where outbreaks are most commonly reported. Here we show that the dynamics of an anthrax-causing agent, Bacillus cereus biovar anthracis, in a tropical rainforest have severe consequences for local wildlife communities. Using data and samples collected over three decades, we show that rainforest anthrax is a persistent and widespread cause of death for a broad range of mammalian hosts. We predict that this pathogen will accelerate the decline and possibly result in the extirpation of local chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes verus) populations. We present the epidemiology of a cryptic pathogen and show that its presence has important implications for conservation

A Spatial Distribution Study of Faunal Remains from Two Lower Magdalenian Occupation Levels in El Mirón Cave, Cantabria, Spain

Abstract: Human behaviour can be reconstructed by analysing specific activities and campsite organization using spatial analysis. The dense occupation layers of the Lower Cantabrian Magdalenian in the Northern Spain reveal varied aspects of Upper Palaeolithic lifeways, including evidence of specific localized activities. The outer vestibule of El Mirón cave has a particularly rich and intact Lower Magdalenian occupation horizon, Levels 15–17. The excavations in the outer vestibule “Cabin” area of the site revealed excellent bone preservation. Artefacts and faunal remains were individually recorded and sediments water-screened to yield a large sample of archaeological finds and spatial data. Zooarchaeological analysis provided the taxonomic, anatomic and taphonomic determination of the faunal individual finds. Smaller animal remains were categorized and counted; special attention was given to the identification of anthropogenic modifications such as burnt bones or bone flakes. These small refuse items are considered to be useful, in situ indicators of localized activities. The spatial distribution analysis of this dense and complex palimpsest of El Mirón Lower Cantabrian Magdalenian layers required GIS based methods including density analysis, heatmaps and cluster analysis. Based on the spatial distribution of Level 15 and 16 faunal remains, different activity areas were identified comprising hearth, working and dropping zones. These results imply the deliberately segregated use of space within the Lower Cantabrian Magdalenian site area, in which bone-processing activities played a central rol

A multivariant secure framework for smart mobile health application

This is an accepted manuscript of an article published by Wiley in Transactions on Emerging Telecommunications Technologies, available online: https://doi.org/10.1002/ett.3684 The accepted version of the publication may differ from the final published version.Wireless sensor network enables remote connectivity of technological devices such as smart mobile with the internet. Due to its low cost as well as easy availability of data sharing and accessing devices, the Internet of Things (IoT) has grown exponentially during the past few years. The availability of these devices plays a remarkable role in the new era of mHealth. In mHealth, the sensors generate enormous amounts of data and the context-aware computing has proven to collect and manage the data. The context aware computing is a new domain to be aware of context of involved devices. The context-aware computing is playing a very significant part in the development of smart mobile health applications to monitor the health of patients more efficiently. Security is one of the key challenges in IoT-based mHealth application development. The wireless nature of IoT devices motivates attackers to attack on application; these vulnerable attacks can be denial of service attack, sinkhole attack, and select forwarding attack. These attacks lead intruders to disrupt the application's functionality, data packet drops to malicious end and changes the route of data and forwards the data packet to other location. There is a need to timely detect and prevent these threats in mobile health applications. Existing work includes many security frameworks to secure the mobile health applications but all have some drawbacks. This paper presents existing frameworks, the impact of threats on applications, on information, and different security levels. From this line of research, we propose a security framework with two algorithms, ie, (i) patient priority autonomous call and (ii) location distance based switch, for mobile health applications and make a comparative analysis of the proposed framework with the existing ones.Published onlin

Modeling users' search through contextual graphs.

National audienceThis paper presents a work on a comparison between a user model and user's behavior based on three premises. First, any system includes a representation of its users. Second, the external representation of users in a system is related to how the system is used by users. Third, knowing how to use the system depends on the task context. For making context explicit in order to use it, we use contextual graphs to capture the effective behaviors of users in an activity of information retrieval on a scientific website. We show how such a context-based representation may help to predict the search behavior of visitors to the website pages. We extend the capability of the system by a preliminary study based on a technique of eye tracking coupled with the contextual-graph representation. This approach allows dealing with a system that is able to incrementally acquire new knowledge from the user and learn new practices when the system is in a situation of failure.Ce papier présente un travail sur la comparaison entre un modèle utilisateur et le comportement réel de l'utilisateur reposant sur trois prémisses : 1) tout système interagissant avec un utilisateur possède un modèle de celui-ci ; 2) la représentation externe des utilisateurs dépend de l'utilisation qui est faite du système par l'utilisateur ; 3) connaître le type d'utilisation du système dépend du contexte dans lequel la tâche doit être exécutée. L'explicitation du contexte en vue de son utilisation conduit à utiliser les graphes contextuels pour capturer les comportements effectifs des utilisateurs dans une activité de recherche d'information sur un site web scientifique. Nous avons étendu les capacités d'un système d'aide dans une étude préliminaire basée sur une technique de repérage de mouvements oculaires en couplage avec la représentation en graphes contextuels. Cette approche permet de composer avec un système capable d'acquérir de manière incrémentale de nouvelles connaissances de l'utilisateur, et ainsi apprendre de nouvelles pratiques développées par les utilisateurs quand il est en échec

SART: A system for supporting operators with contextual knowledge

The regulation of the subway line traffic is a domain where human controllers must deal with a huge quantity of knowledge pieces more or less implicit in the regulation itself. When an incident occurs on a subway line, the operator--the controller who has currently the responsibility of the subway line--must choose the best strategy to apply for moving from the incidental context to the operational one. An incident on the subway line may cause traffic delay or service interruption, and may last for a long or short time, depending on the nature of the incident and many other elements. Operators mainly focus on contextual information for incident solving. An operator said that "When an incident occurs, I first look at what the incident context is." We propose to support subway line traffic controllers in incident-solving with the SART system (French acronym for support system in the traffic regulation). SART is a decision support system based on the contextual analysis of events that arise at the time of the incident. It uses a context-based representation of incidents and applies a context-based reasoning. We discuss in this paper a context-based representation of incidents on the basis of the onion metaphor. The SART project now enters the second year of system design and development and implies two universities and two subway companies in France and Brazil

Understanding context before using it

Abstract. This paper presents an attempt to point out some problematic issues about the understanding of context. Although frequently used in cognitive sciences or other disciplines, context stays a very ill-defined concept. Our goal is to identify the main components of the context on the basis of the analysis of a corpus of 150 definitions coming mainly from the web in different domains of cognitive sciences and close disciplines. We analyzed this corpus of definitions through two methods, namely LSA [1], [2] and STONE [3], [4], and we conclude that finally the content of all the definitions can be analyzed in terms of few parameters like constraint, influence, behavior, nature, structure and system

Wine catechins differently alter the xenobiotic-metabolizing enzymes in germfree and human-flora-associated rats

International audienc