Distributional extensions of Carollia castanea and Micronycteris minuta from Guatemala, Central America

Field expeditions in 2011 that inventoried the terrestrial vertebrate fauna of two wildlife protected areas in the tropical Caribbean of Guatemala have produced the first confirmed records of two bats for the country: the white-bellied big-eared bat, Micronycteris (Schizonycteris) minuta (Gervais 1856) and the Chesnut short-tailed bat Carollia castanea H. Allen, 1890, both of neotropical distribution and with their current northern limit at Lancetilla, Honduras. The record of M. minuta at Sierra de Caral, Guatemala extends the range of this species 137 km to the west, and the record of C. castanea at Cerro San Gil extends its range 147 km to the west

Quasienergy spectrum and tunneling current in ac-driven triple quantum dot shuttles

The dynamics of electrons in ac driven double quantum dots have been extensively analyzed by means of Floquet theory. In these systems, coherent destruction of tunneling has been shown to occur for certain ac field parameters. In the present work we analyze, by means of Floquet theory, the electron dynamics of a triple quantum dot in series attached to electric contacts, where the central dot position oscillates. In particular, we analyze the quasienergy spectrum of this ac driven nanoelectromechanical system, as a function of the intensity and frequency of the ac field and of external dc voltages. For strong driving fields, we derive, by means of perturbation theory, analytical expressions for the quasienergies of the driven oscillator system. From this analysis we discuss the conditions for coherent destruction of tunneling (CDT) to occur as a function of detuning and field parameters. For zero detuning, and from the invariance of the Floquet Hamiltonian under a generalized parity transformation, we find analytical expressions describing the symmetry properties of the Fourier components of the Floquet states under such transformation. By using these expressions, we show that in the vicinity of the CDT condition, the quasienergy spectrum exhibits exact crossings which can be characterized by the parity properties of the corresponding eigenvectors

Evaluación de los niveles de actividad física y salud mental en universitarios durante la pandemia SARS-COV2

The main aim of this research is to evaluate the levels of physical activity (PA) and mental health in university students during the COVID-19 coronavirus (SARS-COV2) pandemic. The DASS-21 scale, the Global Physical Activity Questionnaire (GPAQ) and the SF-36 Health Questionnaire were applied to 63 university students from the State of Veracruz, Mexico, aged 18 to 24 years. in the statistical software SPSS v.25, a result that 76.2% of the population was found to be physically active, the correlation coefficients between physical activity and anxiety (r=-.41) physical activity and stress (r=-.42) showed correlations moderate to intense respectively. Concluding that physical activity during the pandemic was shown to significantly reduce problems related to mental health.El objetivo principal de esta investigación, es evaluar los niveles de actividad física (AF) y salud mental en universitarios durante la pandemia del coronavirus COVID-19 (SARS-COV2). Se aplicó la escala DASS-21, el Cuestionario Mundial sobre Actividad Física (GPAQ) y el Cuestionario de Salud SF-36 a de 63 jóvenes universitarios originarios del Estado de Veracruz, México, de 18 a 24 años, el tratamiento de datos se realizó en el software estadístico SPSS v.25, resultado que 76.2% de la población se encontró físicamente activa, los coeficientes de correlación entre actividad física y ansiedad (r=-.41) actividad física y estrés (r=-.42) mostraron correlaciones moderadas a intensas respectivamente. Concluyendo que la actividad física durante la pandemia, demostró reducir significativamente los problemas relacionados a la salud mental

Formal Hecke algebras and algebraic oriented cohomology theories

In the present paper we generalize the construction of the nil Hecke ring of Kostant-Kumar to the context of an arbitrary algebraic oriented cohomology theory of Levine-Morel and Panin-Smirnov, e.g. to Chow groups, Grothendieck's K_0, connective K-theory, elliptic cohomology, and algebraic cobordism. The resulting object, which we call a formal (affine) Demazure algebra, is parameterized by a one-dimensional commutative formal group law and has the following important property: specialization to the additive and multiplicative periodic formal group laws yields completions of the nil Hecke and the 0-Hecke rings respectively. We also introduce a deformed version of the formal (affine) Demazure algebra, which we call a formal (affine) Hecke algebra. We show that the specialization of the formal (affine) Hecke algebra to the additive and multiplicative periodic formal group laws gives completions of the degenerate (affine) Hecke algebra and the usual (affine) Hecke algebra respectively. We show that all formal affine Demazure algebras (and all formal affine Hecke algebras) become isomorphic over certain coefficient rings, proving an analogue of a result of Lusztig.Comment: 28 pages. v2: Some results strengthened and references added. v3: Minor corrections, section numbering changed to match published version. v4: Sign errors in Proposition 6.8(d) corrected. This version incorporates an erratum to the published versio

Female brain size affects the assessment of male attractiveness during mate choice

Mate choice decisions are central in sexual selection theory aimed to understand how sexual traits evolve and their role in evolutionary diversification. We test the hypothesis that brain size and cognitive ability are important for accurate assessment of partner quality and that variation in brain size and cognitive ability underlies variation in mate choice. We compared sexual preference in guppy female lines selected for divergence in relative brain size, which we have previously shown to have substantial differences in cognitive ability. In a dichotomous choice test, large-brained and wild-type females showed strong preference for males with color traits that predict attractiveness in this species. In contrast, small-brained females showed no preference for males with these traits. In-depth analysis of optomotor response to color cues and gene expression of key opsins in the eye revealed that the observed differences were not due to differences in visual perception of color, indicating that differences in the ability to process indicators of attractiveness are responsible. We thus provide the first experimental support that individual variation in brain size affects mate choice decisions and conclude that differences in cognitive ability may be an important underlying mechanism behind variation in female mate choice

*omeSOM: a software for clustering and visualization of transcriptional and metabolite data mined from interspecific crosses of crop plants

Background: Modern biology uses experimental systems that involve the exploration of phenotypic variation as a result of the recombination of several genomes. Such systems are useful to investigate the functional evolution of metabolic networks. One such approach is the analysis of transcript and metabolite profiles. These kinds of studies generate a large amount of data, which require dedicated computational tools for their analysis.Results: This paper presents a novel software named *omeSOM (transcript/metabol-ome Self Organizing Map) that implements a neural model for biological data clustering and visualization. It allows the discovery of relationships between changes in transcripts and metabolites of crop plants harboring introgressed exotic alleles and furthermore, its use can be extended to other type of omics data. The software is focused on the easy identification of groups including different molecular entities, independently of the number of clusters formed. The *omeSOM software provides easy-to-visualize interfaces for the identification of coordinated variations in the co-expressed genes and co-accumulated metabolites. Additionally, this information is linked to the most widely used gene annotation and metabolic pathway databases.Conclusions: *omeSOM is a software designed to give support to the data mining task of metabolic and transcriptional datasets derived from different databases. It provides a user-friendly interface and offers several visualization features, easy to understand by non-expert users. Therefore, *omeSOM provides support for data mining tasks and it is applicable to basic research as well as applied breeding programs. The software and a sample dataset are available free of charge at http://sourcesinc.sourceforge.net/omesom/.Fil: Milone, Diego Humberto. Universidad Nacional del Litoral. Facultad de Ingeniería y Ciencias Hídricas. Departamento de Informática. Laboratorio de Investigaciones en Señales e Inteligencia Computacional; Argentina. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - Santa Fe; ArgentinaFil: Stegmayer, Georgina. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - Santa Fe; Argentina. Universidad Tecnológica Nacional. Facultad Regional Santa Fe. Centro de Investigación y Desarrollo de Ingeniería en Sistemas de Información; ArgentinaFil: Kamenetzky, Laura. Instituto Nacional de Tecnología Agropecuaria. Centro de Investigación en Ciencias Veterinarias y Agronómicas. Instituto de Biotecnología; Argentina. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - Santa Fe; ArgentinaFil: López, Mariana. Instituto Nacional de Tecnología Agropecuaria. Centro de Investigación en Ciencias Veterinarias y Agronómicas. Instituto de Biotecnología; ArgentinaFil: Lee, Je M.. Cornell University; Estados UnidosFil: Giovannoni, James J.. Cornell University; Estados UnidosFil: Carrari, Fernando Oscar. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - Santa Fe; Argentina. Instituto Nacional de Tecnología Agropecuaria. Centro de Investigación en Ciencias Veterinarias y Agronómicas. Instituto de Biotecnología; Argentin

Exploring pig trade patterns to inform the design of risk-based disease surveillance and control strategies

An understanding of the patterns of animal contact networks provides essential information for the design of risk-based animal disease surveillance and control strategies. This study characterises pig movements throughout England and Wales between 2009 and 2013 with a view to characterising spatial and temporal patterns, network topology and trade communities. Data were extracted from the Animal and Plant Health Agency (APHA)’s RADAR (Rapid Analysis and Detection of Animal-related Risks) database, and analysed using descriptive and network approaches. A total of 61,937,855 pigs were moved through 872,493 movements of batches in England and Wales during the 5-year study period. Results show that the network exhibited scale-free and small-world topologies, indicating the potential for diseases to quickly spread within the pig industry. The findings also provide suggestions for how risk-based surveillance strategies could be optimised in the country by taking account of highly connected holdings, geographical regions and time periods with the greatest number of movements and pigs moved, as these are likely to be at higher risk for disease introduction. This study is also the first attempt to identify trade communities in the country, information which could be used to facilitate the pig trade and maintain disease-free status across the country in the event of an outbreak

Vortex deformation and breaking in superconductors: A microscopic description

Vortex breaking has been traditionally studied for nonuniform critical current densities, although it may also appear due to nonuniform pinning force distributions. In this article we study the case of a high-pinning/low-pinning/high-pinning layered structure. We have developed an elastic model for describing the deformation of a vortex in these systems in the presence of a uniform transport current density $J$ for any arbitrary orientation of the transport current and the magnetic field. If $J$ is above a certain critical value, $J_c$, the vortex breaks and a finite effective resistance appears. Our model can be applied to some experimental configurations where vortex breaking naturally exists. This is the case for YBa$_2$Cu$_3$O$_{7-x}$ (YBCO) low angle grain boundaries and films on vicinal substrates, where the breaking is experienced by Abrikosov-Josephson vortices (AJV) and Josephson string vortices (SV), respectively. With our model, we have experimentally extracted some intrinsic parameters of the AJV and SV, such as the line tension $\epsilon_l$ and compared it to existing predictions based on the vortex structure.Comment: 11 figures in 13 files; minor changes after printing proof

COVID-19 pandemic on coronary artery and cerebrovascular diseases in Southern Spain: interrupted time series analysis

Objective: Healthcare systems have been put under intense pressure by the COVID-19 pandemic, although some studies have shown a decline in hospital admissions for cardiovascular and cerebrovascular diseases during the first and second wave of the pandemic. In addition, studies analyzing gender and procedural differences are scarce. The present study aimed to determine the impact of the pandemic on hospital admissions for acute myocardial infarction (AMI) and cerebrovascular disease (CVD) in Andalusia (Spain) and analyzed differences by gender and by percutaneous coronary interventions performed. Patients and methods: An interrupted time series analysis of AMI and CVD hospital admissions in Andalusia (Spain) was carried out to measure the impact of the COVID-19 outbreak. AMI and CVD cases admitted daily in public hospitals of Andalusia between January 2018 and December 2020 were included. Results: During the pandemic, significant reductions in AMI [-19%; 95% confidence interval (CI): (-29%, -9%), p<0.001] and CVD [-17%; 95% CI: (-26%, -9%); p<0.01] in daily hospital admissions were observed. Differences were also produced according to the diagnosis (ST-Elevation Myocardial Infarction, Non-ST-Elevation Myocardial Infarction, other AMI and stroke), with a greater reduction in females for AMI and in males for CVD. Although there were more percutaneous coronary interventions during the pandemic, no significant reductions were observed. Conclusions: A decline in AMI and CVD daily hospital admissions during the first and second wave of COVID-19 pandemic was noted. Gender differences were observed, but no clear impact was observed in percutaneous interventions

Statistically derived contributions of diverse human influences to twentieth-century temperature changes

The warming of the climate system is unequivocal as evidenced by an increase in global temperatures by 0.8 °C over the past century. However, the attribution of the observed warming to human activities remains less clear, particularly because of the apparent slow-down in warming since the late 1990s. Here we analyse radiative forcing and temperature time series with state-of-the-art statistical methods to address this question without climate model simulations. We show that long-term trends in total radiative forcing and temperatures have largely been determined by atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations, and modulated by other radiative factors. We identify a pronounced increase in the growth rates of both temperatures and radiative forcing around 1960, which marks the onset of sustained global warming. Our analyses also reveal a contribution of human interventions to two periods when global warming slowed down. Our statistical analysis suggests that the reduction in the emissions of ozone-depleting substances under the Montreal Protocol, as well as a reduction in methane emissions, contributed to the lower rate of warming since the 1990s. Furthermore, we identify a contribution from the two world wars and the Great Depression to the documented cooling in the mid-twentieth century, through lower carbon dioxide emissions. We conclude that reductions in greenhouse gas emissions are effective in slowing the rate of warming in the short term.F.E. acknowledges financial support from the Consejo Nacional de Ciencia y Tecnologia (http://www.conacyt.gob.mx) under grant CONACYT-310026, as well as from PASPA DGAPA of the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico. (CONACYT-310026 - Consejo Nacional de Ciencia y Tecnologia; PASPA DGAPA of the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico