Adults can be trained to acquire synesthetic experiences

Synesthesia is a condition where presentation of one perceptual class consistently evokes additional experiences in different perceptual categories. Synesthesia is widely considered a congenital condition, although an alternative view is that it is underpinned by repeated exposure to combined perceptual features at key developmental stages. Here we explore the potential for repeated associative learning to shape and engender synesthetic experiences. Non-synesthetic adult participants engaged in an extensive training regime that involved adaptive memory and reading tasks, designed to reinforce 13 specific letter-color associations. Following training, subjects exhibited a range of standard behavioral and physiological markers for grapheme-color synesthesia; crucially, most also described perceiving color experiences for achromatic letters, inside and outside the lab, where such experiences are usually considered the hallmark of genuine synesthetes. Collectively our results are consistent with developmental accounts of synesthesia and illuminate a previously unsuspected potential for new learning to shape perceptual experience, even in adulthood

Effects of Joint Space Use and Group Membership on Contact Rates Among White-Tailed Deer

Establishment and spread of infectious diseases are controlled by the frequency of contacts among hosts. Although managers can estimate transmission coefficients from the relationship between disease prevalence and age or time, they may wish to quantify or compare contact rates before a disease is established or while it is at very low prevalence. Our objectives were to quantify direct and indirect contacts rates among white-tailed deer (Odocoileus virginianus) and to compare these measures of contact rate with simpler measures of joint space use. We deployed Global Positioning System (GPS) collars on 23 deer near Carbondale, Illinois, USA, from 2002 to 2005. We used location data from the GPS collars to measure pairwise rates of direct and indirect contact, based on a range of proximity criteria and time lags, as well as volume of intersection (VI) of kernel utilization distributions. We analyzed contact rates at a given distance criterion and time lag using mixed-model logistic regression. Direct contact rates increased with increasing VI and were higher in autumn–spring than in summer. After accounting for VI, the estimated odds of direct contact during autumn–spring periods were 5.0–22.1-fold greater (depending on the proximity criterion) for pairs of deer in the same social group than for between-group pairs, but for direct contacts during summer the within:between-group odds ratio did not differ significantly from 1. Indirect contact rates also increased with VI, but the effects of both season and pair-type were much smaller than for direct contacts and differed little as the time lag increased from 1–30 days. These results indicate that simple measures of joint space use are insufficient indices of direct contact because group membership can substantially increase contacts at a given level of joint space use. With indirect transmission, however, group membership had a much smaller influence after accounting for VI. Relationships between contact rates and season, VI, and pair-type were generally robust to changes in the proximity criterion defining a contact, and patterns of indirect contacts were affected little by the choice of time lag from 1–30 days. The use of GPS collars provides a framework for testing hypotheses about the form of contact networks among large mammals and comparing potential direct and indirect contact rates across gradients of ecological factors, such as population density or landscape configuration

Benefits of Position–Sensitive Detectors for Source Detection with Known Background

We address the question of whether or not the directional or imaging information offered by a position-sensitive gamma-ray detector improves the detection accuracy when searching for a source of known shape amid a background of known intensity. We formulate the detection problem as a composite hypothesis testing problem and examine the behavior of the generalized likelihood ratio test (GLRT) in terms of the area under the receiver operating characteristic (AUC). Due to the analytical complexity of the GLRT in this case, we examine its asymptotic properties when the number of detected photons is large. We find that a detector of uniform sensitivity can more accurately detect a source when imaging information is used.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/85968/1/Fessler245.pd

Native Chemical Ligation−Photodesulfurization in Flow

Native chemical ligation (NCL) combined with desulfurization chemistry has revolutionized the way in which large polypeptides and proteins are accessed by chemical synthesis. Herein, we outline the use of flow chemistry for the ligation-based assembly of polypeptides. We also describe the development of a novel photodesulfurization transformation that, when coupled with flow NCL, enables efficient access to native polypeptides on time scales up to 2 orders of magnitude faster than current batch NCL–desulfurization methods. The power of the new ligation–photodesulfurization flow platform is showcased through the rapid synthesis of the 36 residue clinically approved HIV entry inhibitor enfuvirtide and the peptide diagnostic agent somatorelin.ARC Future Fellowship Scheme 25

Space Use and Survival of White-Tailed Deer in an Exurban Landscape

Exurban development is nonmetropolitan, residential development characterized by a human population density and average property size intermediate between suburban and rural areas. Although growth in exurban areas is outpacing that of urban, suburban, or rural landscapes, studies of deer (Odocoileus spp.) ecology in exurban areas are nonexistent. During 2003–2005, we studied space use (i.e., seasonal home-range and core-area size and habitat use relative to human dwellings) and survival of 43 female white-tailed deer (O. virginianus) in an exurban setting near Carbondale, Illinois. Deer had larger home ranges than most suburban deer populations and generally smaller home ranges than rural deer populations. When we analytically controlled for habitat use, deer exhibited a subtle avoidance of human dwellings, especially during the fawning season. The annual survival rate was among the highest reported in the literature at 0.872 (SE=0.048). Only 5 deer (cause-specific mortality rate=0.091) were harvested by hunters, indicating major obstacles for wildlife managers when attempting to manage deer in exurban areas using traditional hunter harvest

Benefits of Position-Sensitive Detectors for Radioactive Source Detection

There are many systems for counting photons such as gamma-rays emitted from radioactive sources. Many of these systems are also position-sensitive, which means that the system provides directional information about recorded events. This paper investigates whether or not the additional information provided by position-sensitive capability improves the performance of detecting a point-source in background. We analyze the asymptotic performance of the generalized likelihood ratio test (GLRT) and a test based on the maximum-likelihood (ML) estimate of the source intensity for systems with and without position-sensitive capability. When the background intensity is known and detector sensitivity is spatially uniform, we prove that position-sensitive capability increases the area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC). For cases when detector sensitivity is nonuniform or background intensity is unknown, we provide numerical results to illustrate the effect of the parameters on detection performance.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/85967/1/Fessler6.pd

Acute Effects of a Multi-Ingredient Pre-Workout Supplement On 5-KM Running Performance in Recreationally-Trained Athletes

International Journal of Exercise Science 12(2): 1045-1056, 2019. The purpose of the present study was to examine the effects of an acute dose of a multi-ingredient pre-workout supplement on 5-km running performance and subjective measures of fatigue. Twenty aerobically-trained, males (n= 10, mean ± SD = 80.8 ± 6.1 kg) and females (n= 10, 64.5 ± 6.6 kg) completed two 5-km running races for time in a double-blind, cross-over fashion. During the first session, subjects were randomly assigned to ingest the supplement or placebo 30 minutes prior to running a 5-km race. The supplement contained multiple ingredients including caffeine anhydrous (150 mg), beta alanine (1.6 g), and arginine alpha-ketoglutarate (AKG) (1.0 g). Subjects also completed a 5-point Likert scale (1 = low, 5 = high) questionnaire to determine feelings of fatigue immediately prior to ingesting the substance (baseline), 30 minutes post-ingestion (immediately pre-race), and 5 minutes post-race. For the second session, subjects ingested the opposite substance (supplement or placebo) and underwent the same testing procedures (including time of day) as the first session. The results indicated there was no significant (p\u3e 0.05) difference in 5-km race time between the supplement (23.62 ± 2.08 min) and placebo (23.51 ± 1.97 min) conditions. For the feelings of fatigue, there were no significant condition x time interactions or main effects for condition, but there were main effects for time. These findings indicated that the pre-workout supplement provided no ergogenic effect on 5-km race time or subjective feelings of fatigue when administered on an acute basis in aerobically-trained individuals

For an environmental ethnography in human and physical geography : re-envisioning the impacts and opportunities of El Niño in Peru

Funding: This work was supported by the Royal Society under Grant RG120575; the Natural and Environmental Research Council under Grant NE/R004528/1; the Scottish Funding Council under Grant SGS0-XFC090; and The Arts and Humanities Research Council under Grant AH/T004444/1AH.In 2017 El Niño Costero devastated the northern coast of Peru. This article seeks to learn from this experience for future large central and eastern Pacific-driven El Niño events. It directs attention away from dominant disaster narratives to reflect on the opportunities that El Niño rains have generated for desert livelihoods over time. We make a call for and set out the key elements of a historical geographical ethnography approach in environmental geography, which, as well as examining climate dimensions (paleoclimatology, dendrochronological, and atmospheric changes) of El Niño, also aims to consider its impacts on the livelihoods and management strategies of desert communities over time. We take as a starting point the responses of people who themselves come directly into contact with environmental change, yet whose agency and experiences are often marginal in knowledge production about El Niño. Responding to recent calls for qualitative geography researchers to be more explicit about how data are collected and analyzed, we explain how and why it is important to compare stakeholder interviews and climate records with newspaper archives and community memories of the 1983 and 1998 El Niño events. We illustrate that for desert populations in northern Peru, El Niño can represent abundance as well as disaster and make visible their role in managing change after El Niño flooding.Peer reviewe

Social Affiliation and Contact Patterns Among White-tailed Deer in Disparate Landscapes: Implications for Disease Transmission

In social species, individuals contact members of the same group much more often than those of other groups, particularly for contacts that could directly transmit disease agents. This disparity in contact rates violates the assumptions of simple disease models, hinders disease spread between groups, and could decouple disease transmission from population density. Social behavior of white-tailed deer has important implications for the long-term dynamics and impact of diseases such as bovine tuberculosis and chronic wasting disease (CWD), so expanding our understanding of their social system is important. White-tailed deer form matrilineal groups, which inhabit stable home ranges that overlap somewhat with others—a pattern intermediate between mass-action and strict territoriality. To quantify how group membership affects their contact rates and document the spectrum of social affiliation, we analyzed location data from global positioning system (GPS) collars on female and juvenile white-tailed deer in 2 study areas: near Carbondale in forest-dominated southern Illinois (2002–2006) and near Lake Shelbyville in agriculture-dominated central Illinois (2006–2009). For each deer dyad (i.e., 2 individual deer with sufficient overlapping GPS data), we measured space-use overlap, correlation of movements, direct contact rate (simultaneous GPS locations \u3c 10 m apart), and indirect contact rate (GPS locations \u3c 10 m apart when offset by 1 or 3 days). Direct contact rates were substantially higher for within-group dyads than between-group dyads, but group membership had little apparent effect on indirect contact rates. The group membership effect on direct contact rates was strongest in winter and weakest in summer, with no apparent difference between study areas. Social affiliations were not dichotomous, with some deer dyads showing loose but positive affiliation. Even for obvious within-group dyads, their strength of affiliation fluctuated between years, seasons, and even days. Our findings highlight the poor fit between deer behavior and simple models of disease transmission and, combined with previous infection data, suggest that direct contact is the primary driver of CWD transmission among free living female and juvenile white-tailed deer