Natural history contributions of the University of Glasgow Exploration Society to Scotland and the World

Expeditions with a natural history focus have been organised by University of Glasgow staff and students since the 1930s. The educational benefits of such expeditions to students have been reported by Harper et al. ( Journal of Biological Education 51, 3- 16; 2017). Here, we present a short history of these expeditions, concentrating on their scientific achievements. In addition to expedition reports, a large number of PhD theses, masters and honours project reports and scientific papers have been based on expedition work. Many biological specimens have been deposited in museums, including some new species. We provide case histories of four expedition locations, to demonstrate the variety of work done, and the value of returning many times to the same place: Scotland, Trinidad and Tobago, North Cyprus and Ecuador. A major problem for expeditions is funding. For many years, the Carnegie Trust for the Universities of Scotland ran a funding stream that was crucial to the viability of Scottish university expeditions, but this has sadly now closed. For Glasgow University expeditions, the Blodwen Lloyd Binns Bequest has provided a reliable source since 1994, and we hope that it will continue to do so

Blue-light filtering spectacle lenses for visual performance, sleep, and macular health in adults

This is a protocol for a Cochrane Review (Intervention). The objectives are as follows: To assess whether blue-light filtering spectacle lenses impart effects on visual function, provide protection to the macula, or both. We will also examine potential effects on the sleep-wake cycle

Creative professional users musical relevance criteria

Although known item searching for music can be dealt with by searching metadata using existing text search techniques, human subjectivity and variability within the music itself make it very difficult to search for unknown items. This paper examines these problems within the context of text retrieval and music information retrieval. The focus is on ascertaining a relationship between music relevance criteria and those relating to relevance judgements in text retrieval. A data-rich collection of relevance judgements by creative professionals searching for unknown musical items to accompany moving images using real world queries is analysed. The participants in our observations are found to take a socio-cognitive approach and use a range of content and context based criteria. These criteria correlate strongly with those arising from previous text retrieval studies despite the many differences between music and text in their actual content

MRI-based Surgical Planning for Lumbar Spinal Stenosis

The most common reason for spinal surgery in elderly patients is lumbar spinal stenosis(LSS). For LSS, treatment decisions based on clinical and radiological information as well as personal experience of the surgeon shows large variance. Thus a standardized support system is of high value for a more objective and reproducible decision. In this work, we develop an automated algorithm to localize the stenosis causing the symptoms of the patient in magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). With 22 MRI features of each of five spinal levels of 321 patients, we show it is possible to predict the location of lesion triggering the symptoms. To support this hypothesis, we conduct an automated analysis of labeled and unlabeled MRI scans extracted from 788 patients. We confirm quantitatively the importance of radiological information and provide an algorithmic pipeline for working with raw MRI scans

Structural phase transitions in the kagome lattice based materials Cs2-xRbxSnCu3F12 (x = 0, 0.5, 1.0, 1.5)

The solid solution Cs2-xRbxSnCu3F12 (x = 0, 0.5, 1.0, 1.5) has been investigated crystallographically between 100 and 300 K using synchrotron X-ray powder diffraction and, in the case of x = 0, neutron powder diffraction.Comment: 14 pages, 9 figure

On the Theory of Evolution Versus the Concept of Evolution: Three Observations

Here we address three misconceptions stated by Rice et al. in their observations of our article Paz-y-Miño and Espinosa (Evo Edu Outreach 2:655–675, 2009), published in this journal. The five authors titled their note “The Theory of Evolution is Not an Explanation for the Origin of Life.” First, we argue that it is fallacious to believe that because the formulation of the theory of evolution, as conceived in the 1800s, did not include an explanation for the origin of life, nor of the universe, the concept of evolution would not allow us to hypothesize the possible beginnings of life and its connections to the cosmos. Not only Stanley Miller’s experiments of 1953 led scientists to envision a continuum from the inorganic world to the origin and diversification of life, but also Darwin’s own writings of 1871. Second, to dismiss the notion of Rice et al. that evolution does not provide explanations concerning the universe or the cosmos, we identify compelling scientific discussions on the topics: Zaikowski et al. (Evo Edu Outreach 1:65–73, 2008), Krauss (Evo Edu Outreach 3:193–197, 2010), Peretó et al. (Orig Life Evol Biosph 39:395–406, 2009) and Follmann and Brownson (Naturwissenschaften 96:1265–1292, 2009). Third, although we acknowledge that the term Darwinism may not be inclusive of all new discoveries in evolution, and also that creationists and Intelligent Designers hijack the term to portray evolution as ideology, we demonstrate that there is no statistical evidence suggesting that the word Darwinism interferes with public acceptance of evolution, nor does the inclusion of the origin of life or the universe within the concept of evolution. We examine the epistemological and empirical distinction between the theory of evolution and the concept of evolution and conclude that, although the distinction is important, it should not compromise scientific logic

Neutron scattering sum rules, symmetric exchanges, and helicoidal magnetism in MnSb2O6

MnSb2O6 is based on the noncentrosymmetric P321 space group with magnetic Mn2+ (S=5/2, L≈0) spins ordering below TN=12K in a cycloidal structure. The spin rotation plane was found to be tilted away from the c axis [Kinoshita, Phys. Rev. Lett. 117, 047201 (2016)10.1103/PhysRevLett.117.047201] resulting as a helicoidal ground state, which we refer as the tilted structure. In our previous diffraction study [Chan, Phys. Rev. B 106, 064403 (2022)10.1103/PhysRevB.106.064403] we found no evidence that this tilted structure is favored over the pure cycloidal order (referred as the untilted structure). The ground-state magnetic structure, expected to be built and originate from seven nearest-neighbor Heisenberg exchange constants, has been shown to be coupled to the underlying crystallographic chirality with polar domain switching being reported. We apply neutron spectroscopy to extract these symmetric exchange constants. Given the high complexity of the magnetic exchange network, crystallographic structure and complications fitting many parameter linear spin-wave models, we take advantage of multiplexed neutron instrumentation to use the first moment sum rule of neutron scattering to estimate these symmetric exchange constants. The first moment of neutron scattering provides a way of deriving the Heisenberg exchange constant between two neighboring spins if the relative angle and distance of the two ordered spins is known. We show that the first moment sum rule combined with the known magnetic ordering wavevector fixes six of the seven exchange constants. The remaining exchange constant is not determined by this analysis because of the equal spatial bond distances present for different chiral exchange interactions. However, we find this parameter is fixed by the magnon dispersion near the magnetic zone boundary, which is not sensitive to the tilting of the global magnetic structure. We then use these parameters to calculate the low-energy spin-waves in the Néel state to reproduce the neutron response without strong antisymmetric coupling. Using Green's response functions, the stability of long-wavelength excitations in the context of our proposed untilted magnetic structures is then discussed. The results show the presence of strong symmetric exchange constants for the chiral exchange pathways and illustrate an underlying coupling between crystallographic and magnetic "chirality"through predominantly symmetric exchange. We further argue that the excitations can be consistently modelled in terms of an untilted magnetic structure in the presence of symmetric-only exchange constants