Four new species of deep water agglutinated foraminifera from the Oligocene-Miocene of the Congo Fan (offshore Angola)

Four new species of deep-water agglutinated benthic foraminifera are described from the Oligocene and Miocene of the Congo Fan, offshore Angola. Scherochorella congoensis n.sp., Paratrochamminoides goroyskiformis n.sp., Haplophragmoides nauticus n.sp. and Portatrochammina profunda n.sp. all occur in deep-sea turbiditic shales and sands from the distal section of the Congo Fan

HP-GAN: Probabilistic 3D human motion prediction via GAN

Predicting and understanding human motion dynamics has many applications, such as motion synthesis, augmented reality, security, and autonomous vehicles. Due to the recent success of generative adversarial networks (GAN), there has been much interest in probabilistic estimation and synthetic data generation using deep neural network architectures and learning algorithms. We propose a novel sequence-to-sequence model for probabilistic human motion prediction, trained with a modified version of improved Wasserstein generative adversarial networks (WGAN-GP), in which we use a custom loss function designed for human motion prediction. Our model, which we call HP-GAN, learns a probability density function of future human poses conditioned on previous poses. It predicts multiple sequences of possible future human poses, each from the same input sequence but a different vector z drawn from a random distribution. Furthermore, to quantify the quality of the non-deterministic predictions, we simultaneously train a motion-quality-assessment model that learns the probability that a given skeleton sequence is a real human motion. We test our algorithm on two of the largest skeleton datasets: NTURGB-D and Human3.6M. We train our model on both single and multiple action types. Its predictive power for long-term motion estimation is demonstrated by generating multiple plausible futures of more than 30 frames from just 10 frames of input. We show that most sequences generated from the same input have more than 50\% probabilities of being judged as a real human sequence. We will release all the code used in this paper to Github

Miocene deep-water agglutinated Foraminifera from ODP Hole 909c: Implications for the paleoceanography of the Fram Strait Area, Greenland Sea

Deep-water agglutinated Foraminifera (DWAF) are investigated from Miocene sediments recovered from ODP Hole 909C in the Fram Strait, Norwegian-Green land Sea. We studied 125 samples from Cores 909C-50R to -103R. and recovered over 60 species of DWAF. The faunal succession in Hole 909C is subdivided into three assemblages based on the stratigraphic ranges of characteristic cosmopolitan taxa. These are: (1) a diverse Reticulophraginium amplectens - Reophanus berggreni Assemblage in Cores 909C-100R-2 to -91R-1 (1040.71-952.78mbsf); (2) a Reticulophragmium amplectens Assemblage in Cores 909C-87R-2, to -71R-3 (915.7-762.68mbsf); and (3) a low-diversity Reticulophraginium rotundidorsatum Assemblage in Cores 909C-71R-1 to -55R-1 (759.68-605.52mbsf). The DWAF assemblages are correlated to the standard chronostratigraphy using dinoflagellate cysts and magnetostratigraphy. The stratigraphic ranges of some well-known Palcogene DWAF species extend far into the Miocene at this locality, confirming tire hypothesis that the Arctic and northern Norwegian Sea basins served as a refuge for these species long after they disappeared from the North Atlantic stratigraphic record. The taxonomic affinities of the Miocene assemblages from Hole 909C supports the idea that an estuarine Circulation pattern has been in place between the Arctic Ocean and Greenland Sea basins since at least the early Miocene. Changes in the benthic foraminiferal morphogroups within the R. rotundidorsatum Assemblage correlate with an increase in total organic carbon, indicating an increase in oceanic productivity in the Fram Strait region during the late Miocene

Miocene deep-water agglutinated foraminifera from the Lomonosov Ridge and the opening of the Fram Strait

Deep-water agglutinated Foraminifera (DWAF) were recovered from Miocene to Pliocene sediments in 103 samples from IODP Hole M0002A on the Lomonosov Ridge. The First Occurrence of DWAF in Hole M0002A is observed just above the color change corresponding to the boundary between Lithological Subunits 1/4 and 1/5 in Core section –44X-1. The foraminiferal record of Hole M0002A consists entirely of agglutinated benthic species, largely sparse assemblages containing Cyclammina pusilla and Alveolophragmium polarensis. The faunal succession in Hole M0002A is subdivided into three assemblages based on the stratigraphic ranges of characteristic taxa: (1) a relatively diverse assemblage at the base of Lithological Subunit 1/4 (Cores 44X-1 to –38X), with abundant agglutinated foraminifera including Reticulophragmium pusillum and Ammolagena clavata, indicating connections with the North Atlantic. This assemblage displays the best preservation, which is here attributed to higher concentrations of dissolved silica in pore waters (2) A less diverse assemblage characterized by Alveolophragmium polarensis with Adercotryma agterbergi, in the lower part of Lithological Subunit 1/3 (Cores –38X to –35X); (3) a sparse residual assemblage within Lithological Subunit 1/3 with Rhabdammina spp., A. polarensis and R. pusillum indicating poor preservation of organically-cemented DWAF in Cores –34X to –10X. A comparison of the DWAF assemblages from the Lomonosov Ridge with previously studied Miocene assemblages from ODP Hole 909C in the Fram Strait, Norwegian-Greenland Sea (Kaminski et al. 2005), suggests that the inflow of Atlantic intermediate water into the Arctic Ocean began prior to 17.5 Ma

Educational implications relating neuroanotomical research and developmental dyslexia

Studies on autopsy of the brains of dyslexics and those measuring brain functioning during cognition during the past decade and a half have shed some light on the possible causes of developmental or specific dyslexia. This article briefly reviews some of the most pertinent research and offers some guidelines for the prognosis and treatment of dyslexic individuals and literary options for reading teachers and specialists to use in working with dyslexia