The global abundance of tree palms

Aim Palms are an iconic, diverse and often abundant component of tropical ecosystems that provide many ecosystem services. Being monocots, tree palms are evolutionarily, morphologically and physiologically distinct from other trees, and these differences have important consequences for ecosystem services (e.g., carbon sequestration and storage) and in terms of responses to climate change. We quantified global patterns of tree palm relative abundance to help improve understanding of tropical forests and reduce uncertainty about these ecosystems under climate change. Location Tropical and subtropical moist forests. Time period Current. Major taxa studied Palms (Arecaceae). Methods We assembled a pantropical dataset of 2,548 forest plots (covering 1,191 ha) and quantified tree palm (i.e., ≥10 cm diameter at breast height) abundance relative to co‐occurring non‐palm trees. We compared the relative abundance of tree palms across biogeographical realms and tested for associations with palaeoclimate stability, current climate, edaphic conditions and metrics of forest structure. Results On average, the relative abundance of tree palms was more than five times larger between Neotropical locations and other biogeographical realms. Tree palms were absent in most locations outside the Neotropics but present in >80% of Neotropical locations. The relative abundance of tree palms was more strongly associated with local conditions (e.g., higher mean annual precipitation, lower soil fertility, shallower water table and lower plot mean wood density) than metrics of long‐term climate stability. Life‐form diversity also influenced the patterns; palm assemblages outside the Neotropics comprise many non‐tree (e.g., climbing) palms. Finally, we show that tree palms can influence estimates of above‐ground biomass, but the magnitude and direction of the effect require additional work. Conclusions Tree palms are not only quintessentially tropical, but they are also overwhelmingly Neotropical. Future work to understand the contributions of tree palms to biomass estimates and carbon cycling will be particularly crucial in Neotropical forests

BLOOM: A 176B-Parameter Open-Access Multilingual Language Model

Large language models (LLMs) have been shown to be able to perform new tasks based on a few demonstrations or natural language instructions. While these capabilities have led to widespread adoption, most LLMs are developed by resource-rich organizations and are frequently kept from the public. As a step towards democratizing this powerful technology, we present BLOOM, a 176B-parameter open-access language model designed and built thanks to a collaboration of hundreds of researchers. BLOOM is a decoder-only Transformer language model that was trained on the ROOTS corpus, a dataset comprising hundreds of sources in 46 natural and 13 programming languages (59 in total). We find that BLOOM achieves competitive performance on a wide variety of benchmarks, with stronger results after undergoing multitask prompted finetuning. To facilitate future research and applications using LLMs, we publicly release our models and code under the Responsible AI License

Liga??es de apoio de pilares em perfil tubular.

O aumento do uso de se??es tubulares em estruturas met?licas tem destacado a necessidade de m?todos que racionalizem as liga??es de barras tubulares, inclusive a liga??o de pilares de a?o e pilares mistos de a?o e concreto ? funda??o de concreto armado, submetida a a??es est?ticas. De maneira geral, essa liga??o est? sujeita a for?a axial, de compress?o ou tra??o, a momento fletor e for?a cortante que podem induzir os seguintes estados-limites ?ltimos: forma??o de charneira pl?stica na placa de base, ruptura por tra??o do chumbador, arrancamento do chumbador, esmagamento do concreto ou da argamassa expansiva de assentamento na regi?o de contato com a placa de base e deslizamento da liga??o, al?m da ruptura da solda de liga??o do pilar ? placa de base. Neste trabalho foram desenvolvidos estudos relativos ao dimensionamento de liga??es de placas de base circulares e retangulares de pilares em perfil tubular circular e retangular. Esses estudos, baseados em avalia??es te?ricas apresentadas em normas e literatura internacionais, conduziram ao comportamento e distribui??o simplificada de esfor?os solicitantes na liga??o, conforme apresentado no texto-base, considerando o equil?brio nos casos de solicita??o axial a compress?o e tra??o, separadamente. O caso C1 correspondente ? situa??o em que n?o h? momento fletor aplicado e a press?o de contato distribui-se uniformemente sob a placa de base; o caso C2, ? situa??o de pequena excentricidade, onde o equil?brio ? poss?vel sem a introdu??o de for?as de tra??o nos chumbadores; o caso C3, ? situa??o de grande excentricidade, onde ? necess?rio considerar for?as de tra??o nos chumbadores, para se manter o equil?brio. Similarmente, para solicita??o axial de tra??o tem-se: o caso T1 correspondente ? situa??o em que n?o h? momento fletor aplicado e a for?a axial de tra??o distribuise uniformemente entre os chumbadores; o caso T2, ? situa??o de pequena excentricidade, onde o equil?brio ? poss?vel sem que haja press?o de contato do concreto sob a placa de base; o caso T3, ? situa??o de grande excentricidade, onde ? necess?rio considerar a exist?ncia de press?o de contato, para que o equil?brio seja mantido. Para cada caso, s?o apresentadas express?es para a determina??o dos esfor?os resistentes de c?lculo correspondentes a cada estado-limite ?ltimo pertinente. S?o apresentadas ainda as disposi??es construtivas relativas aos chumbadores e ao bloco de apoio de concreto armado, necess?rias para que sejam v?lidas as hip?teses e prescri??es adotadas. Finalmente s?o apresentados exemplos de utiliza??o e uma compara??o entre ensaios experimentais realizados na Universidade Federal de Ouro Preto e os obtidos com a metodologia apresentada. Mostra-se que o m?todo adotado conduz a resultados suficientemente conservadores para serem utilizados em projeto

Repurposing the mammalian RNA-binding protein Musashi-1 as an allosteric translation repressor in bacteria

The RNA recognition motif (RRM) is the most common RNA-binding protein domain identified in nature. However, RRM-containing proteins are only prevalent in eukaryotic phyla, in which they play central regulatory roles. Here, we engineered an orthogonal post-transcriptional control system of gene expression in the bacterium Escherichia coli with the mammalian RNA-binding protein Musashi-1, which is a stem cell marker with neurodevelopmental role that contains two canonical RRMs. In the circuit, Musashi-1 is regulated transcriptionally and works as an allosteric translation repressor thanks to a specific interaction with the N-terminal coding region of a messenger RNA and its structural plasticity to respond to fatty acids. We fully characterized the genetic system at the population and single-cell levels showing a significant fold change in reporter expression, and the underlying molecular mechanism by assessing the in vitro binding kinetics and in vivo functionality of a series of RNA mutants. The dynamic response of the system was well recapitulated by a bottom-up mathematical model. Moreover, we applied the post-transcriptional mechanism engineered with Musashi-1 to specifically regulate a gene within an operon, implement combinatorial regulation, and reduce protein expression noise. This work illustrates how RRM-based regulation can be adapted to simple organisms, thereby adding a new regulatory layer in prokaryotes for translation control

Multiple-dose versus single-dose ivermectin for Strongyloides stercoralis infection (Strong Treat 1 to 4): a multicentre, open-label, phase 3, randomised controlled superiority trial

Strongyloides stercoralis infection is a neglected condition that places people who are immunocompromised at risk of hyperinfection and death. Ivermectin is the drug of choice for the treatment of S stercoralis infection, but there is no definitive evidence on the optimal dose. This trial aimed to assess whether multiple doses of ivermectin were superior to a single dose for the treatment of non-disseminated strongyloidiasis