Disengagement of motor cortex from movement control during long-term learning.

Motor learning involves reorganization of the primary motor cortex (M1). However, it remains unclear how the involvement of M1 in movement control changes during long-term learning. To address this, we trained mice in a forelimb-based motor task over months and performed optogenetic inactivation and two-photon calcium imaging in M1 during the long-term training. We found that M1 inactivation impaired the forelimb movements in the early and middle stages, but not in the late stage, indicating that the movements that initially required M1 became independent of M1. As previously shown, M1 population activity became more consistent across trials from the early to middle stage while task performance rapidly improved. However, from the middle to late stage, M1 population activity became again variable despite consistent expert behaviors. This later decline in activity consistency suggests dissociation between M1 and movements. These findings suggest that long-term motor learning can disengage M1 from movement control

Portais Web desenvolvidos no laboratório de bioinformática da Embrapa Soja.

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A Kelvin-wave cascade on a vortex in superfluid 4^4He at a very low temperature

A study by computer simulation is reported of the behaviour of a quantized vortex line at a very low temperature when there is continuous excitation of low-frequency Kelvin waves. There is no dissipation except by phonon radiation at a very high frequency. It is shown that non-linear coupling leads to a net flow of energy to higher wavenumbers and to the development of a simple spectrum of Kelvin waves that is insensitive to the strength and frequency of the exciting drive. The results are likely to be relevant to the decay of turbulence in superfluid $^4$He at very low temperatures

A retrotransposon-inserted VvmybA1a allele has been spread among cultivars of Vitis vinifera but not North American or East Asian Vitis species

Research Note

Performance of a Low Noise Front-end ASIC for Si/CdTe Detectors in Compton Gamma-ray Telescope

Compton telescopes based on semiconductor technologies are being developed to explore the gamma-ray universe in an energy band 0.1--20 MeV, which is not well covered by the present or near-future gamma-ray telescopes. The key feature of such Compton telescopes is the high energy resolution that is crucial for high angular resolution and high background rejection capability. The energy resolution around 1 keV is required to approach physical limit of the angular resolution due to Doppler broadening. We have developed a low noise front-end ASIC (Application-Specific Integrated Circuit), VA32TA, to realize this goal for the readout of Double-sided Silicon Strip Detector (DSSD) and Cadmium Telluride (CdTe) pixel detector which are essential elements of the semiconductor Compton telescope. We report on the design and test results of the VA32TA. We have reached an energy resolution of 1.3 keV (FWHM) for 60 keV and 122 keV at 0 degree C with a DSSD and 1.7 keV (FWHM) with a CdTe detector.Comment: 6 pages, 7 figures, IEEE style file, to appear in IEEE Trans. Nucl. Sc

Sistema Web para estimativas de perdas por seca na cultura da soja.

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Soybean gene express: plataforma para análise de expressão diferencial e bibliotecas substrativas de cDNA.

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Electronic inhomogeneity in EuO: Possibility of magnetic polaron states

We have observed the spatial inhomogeneity of the electronic structure of a single-crystalline electron-doped EuO thin film with ferromagnetic ordering by employing infrared magneto-optical imaging with synchrotron radiation. The uniform paramagnetic electronic structure changes to a uniform ferromagnetic structure via an inhomogeneous state with decreasing temperature and increasing magnetic field slightly above the ordering temperature. One possibility of the origin of the inhomogeneity is the appearance of magnetic polaron states.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figure

Till death (or an intruder) do us part: intrasexual-competition in a monogamous Primate

Polygynous animals are often highly dimorphic, and show large sex-differences in the degree of intra-sexual competition and aggression, which is associated with biased operational sex ratios (OSR). For socially monogamous, sexually monomorphic species, this relationship is less clear. Among mammals, pair-living has sometimes been assumed to imply equal OSR and low frequency, low intensity intra-sexual competition; even when high rates of intra-sexual competition and selection, in both sexes, have been theoretically predicted and described for various taxa. Owl monkeys are one of a few socially monogamous primates. Using long-term demographic and morphological data from 18 groups, we show that male and female owl monkeys experience intense intra-sexual competition and aggression from solitary floaters. Pair-mates are regularly replaced by intruding floaters (27 female and 23 male replacements in 149 group-years), with negative effects on the reproductive success of both partners. Individuals with only one partner during their life produced 25% more offspring per decade of tenure than those with two or more partners. The termination of the pair-bond is initiated by the floater, and sometimes has fatal consequences for the expelled adult. The existence of floaters and the sporadic, but intense aggression between them and residents suggest that it can be misleading to assume an equal OSR in socially monogamous species based solely on group composition. Instead, we suggest that sexual selection models must assume not equal, but flexible, context-specific, OSR in monogamous species.Wenner-Gren Foundation, L.S.B. Leakey Foundation, the National Geographic Society, National Science Foundation (BCS- 0621020), the University of Pennsylvania Research Foundation and the Zoological Society of San Diego, German Science Foundation (HU 1746-2/1