Comment on the letter of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology (SVP) dated April 21, 2020 regarding 'Fossils from conflict zones and reproducibility of fossil‑based scientific data': Myanmar amber

Recently, the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology (SVP) has sent around a letter, dated 21st April, 2020 to more than 300 palaeontological journals, signed by the President, Vice President and a former President of the society (Rayfield et al. 2020). The signatories of this letter request significant changes to the common practices in palaeontology. With our present, multi-authored comment, we aim to argue why these suggestions will not lead to improvement of both practice and ethics of palaeontological research but, conversely, hamper its further development. Although we disagree with most contents of the SVP letter, we appreciate this initiative to discuss scientific practices and the underlying ethics. Here, we consider different aspects of the suggestions by Rayfield et al. (2020) in which we see weaknesses and dangers. It is our intent to compile views from many different fields of palaeontology, as our discipline is (and should remain) pluralistic. This contribution deals with the aspects concerning Myanmar amber. Reference is made to Haug et al. (2020a) for another comment on aspects concerning amateur palaeontologists/citizen scientists/private collectors

Exploring social and health care representations about home birth: an integrative literature review

Aims: exploring social and health care representations of home birth by conducting an integrative review of the literature. Design: Integrative Literature Review. Data sources: the search was based on the following keywords: 'birth, home,' 'home birth,' 'childbirth, home.' And the terms: 'planned home birth,' and 'empowerment women homebirth' (in English). 'partos en casa,' and 'partos domiciliarios' (in Spanish) in the following databases: Biomedical Central, Cochrane Library, Dialnet, DOAJ, Lilacs, PubMed, Scopus, Scielo, and Web of Science. Review methods: a total of 156 publications dated between 2004 and 2017 were initially obtained and a total of 41 articles were finally selected according to the criteria of inclusion, methodological rigor, and researchers' triangulation. Results: four dimensions of the issue emerged out of the 41 articles analyzed: (a) the Dimension of 'Empowerment in Childbirth;' (b) the Dimension of 'Comparative Socio-Medical Childbirth Studies;' (c) the 'Institutional Dimension of Childbirth;' (d) the 'Cultural Dimension of Childbirth.' Conclusion: from the health management perspective, home birth is not widely accepted today as a valid and safe alternative. However, women's social representations indicate an interest in returning to birth at home as a response to the excessive medicalization and institutionalization of childbirth, and value highly its autonomy and comfort

CALIFA, the Calar Alto Legacy Integral Field Area survey III. Second public data release

CALIFA is the first legacy survey being performed at Calar Alto. The CALIFA collaboration would like to thank the IAA-CSIC and MPIA-MPG as major partners of the observatory, and CAHA itself, for the unique access to telescope time and support in manpower and infrastructures. The CALIFA collaboration thanks also the CAHA staff for the dedication to this project. R.G.B., R.G.D., and E.P. are supported by the Spanish Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovacion under grant AYA2010-15081. S.Z. is supported by the EU Marie Curie Integration Grant "SteMaGE" Nr. PCIG12-GA-2012-326466 (Call Identifier: FP7-PEOPLE-2012 CIG). J.F.B. acknowledges support from grants AYA2010-21322-C03-02 and AIB-2010-DE-00227 from the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (MINECO), as well as from the FP7 Marie Curie Actions of the European Commission, via the Initial Training Network DAGAL under REA grant agreement number 289313. Support for L.G. is provided by the Ministry of Economy, Development, and Tourism's Millennium Science Initiative through grant IC12009, awarded to The Millennium Institute of Astrophysics, M.A.S.L.G. also acknowledges support by CONICYT through FONDECYT grant 3140566. A.G. acknowledges support from the FP7/2007-2013 under grant agreement n. 267251 (AstroFIt). J.M.G. acknowledges support from the Fundacao para a Ciencia e a Tecnologia (FCT) through the Fellowship SFRH/BPD/66958/2009 from FCT (Portugal) and research grant PTDC/FIS-AST/3214/2012. RAM was funded by the Spanish programme of International Campus of Excellence Moncloa (CEI). J.M.A. acknowledges support from the European Research Council Starting Grant (SEDmorph; P.I. V. Wild). I.M., J.M. and A.d.O. acknowledge the support by the projects AYA2010-15196 from the Spanish Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovacion and TIC 114 and PO08-TIC-3531 from Junta de Andalucia. AMI acknowledges support from Agence Nationale de la Recherche through the STILISM project (ANR-12-BS05-0016-02). M.M. acknowledges financial support from AYA2010-21887-C04-02 from the Ministerio de Economia y Competitividad. P.P. is supported by an FCT Investigador 2013 Contract, funded by FCT/MCTES (Portugal) and POPH/FSE (EC). P.P. acknowledges support by FCT under project FCOMP-01-0124-FEDER-029170 (Reference FCT PTDC/FIS-AST/3214/2012), funded by FCT-MEC (PIDDAC) and FEDER (COMPETE). T.R.L. thanks the support of the Spanish Ministerio de Educacion, Cultura y Deporte by means of the FPU fellowship. PSB acknowledges support from the Ramon y Cajal program, grant ATA2010-21322-C03-02 from the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (MINECO). C.J.W. acknowledges support through the Marie Curie Career Integration Grant 303912. V.W. acknowledges support from the European Research Council Starting Grant (SEDMorph P.I. V. Wild) and European Career Re-integration Grant (Phiz-Ev P.I.V. Wild). Y.A. acknowledges financial support from the Ramon y Cajal programme (RyC-2011-09461) and project AYA2013-47742-C4-3-P, both managed by the Ministerio de Economia y Competitividad, as well as the "Study of Emission-Line Galaxies with Integral-Field Spectroscopy" (SELGIFS) programme, funded by the EU (FP7-PEOPLE-2013-IRSES-612701) within the Marie-Sklodowska-Curie Actions scheme. We thank the referee David Wilman for very useful comments that improved the presentation of the paper.This paper describes the Second Public Data Release (DR2) of the Calar Alto Legacy Integral Field Area (CALIFA) survey. The data for 200 objects are made public, including the 100 galaxies of the First Public Data Release (DR1). Data were obtained with the integral-field spectrograph PMAS/PPak mounted on the 3.5 m telescope at the Calar Alto observatory. Two different spectral setups are available for each galaxy, (i) a lowresolution V500 setup covering the wavelength range 3745–7500 Å with a spectral resolution of 6.0 Å (FWHM); and (ii) a medium-resolution V1200 setup covering the wavelength range 3650–4840 Å with a spectral resolution of 2.3 Å (FWHM). The sample covers a redshift range between 0.005 and 0.03, with a wide range of properties in the color–magnitude diagram, stellar mass, ionization conditions, and morphological types. All the cubes in the data release were reduced with the latest pipeline, which includes improved spectrophotometric calibration, spatial registration, and spatial resolution. The spectrophotometric calibration is better than 6% and the median spatial resolution is 200 : 4. In total, the second data release contains over 1.5 million spectra.Instituto de Salud Carlos III Spanish Government AYA2010-15081 AYA2010-15196European Union (EU) PCIG12-GA-2012-326466Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (MINECO) AYA2010-21322-C03-02 AIB-2010-DE-00227FP7 Marie Curie Actions of the European Commission, via the Initial Training Network DAGAL under REA 289313Ministry of Economy, Development, and Tourism's Millennium Science Initiative IC12009Comision Nacional de Investigacion Cientifica y Tecnologica (CONICYT) CONICYT FONDECYT 3140566Fundacao para a Ciencia e a Tecnologia (FCT) from FCT (Portugal) SFRH/BPD/66958/2009Spanish programme of International Campus of Excellence Moncloa (CEI)European Research Council (ERC)Junta de Andalucia TIC 114 PO08-TIC-3531French National Research Agency (ANR) ANR-12-BS05-0016-02Spanish Government AYA2010-21887-C04-02FCT Investigador Contract - FCT/MCTES (Portugal)European Commission Joint Research Centre European Social Fund (ESF)FCT - FCT-MEC (PIDDAC) FCOMP-01-0124-FEDER-029170 FCT PTDC/FIS-AST/3214/2012European Union (EU)Spanish Ministerio de Educacion, Cultura y Deporte by FPURamon y Cajal program from the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (MINECO) ATA2010-21322-C03-02European Union (EU) 303912European Career Re-integration GrantSpanish Government RyC-2011-09461 AYA2013-47742-C4-3-PEuropean Union (EU) FP7-PEOPLE-2013-IRSES-612701PTDC/FIS-AST/3214/2012Science & Technology Facilities Council (STFC) ST/K000985/

MEGARA, the R=6000-20000 IFU and MOS of GTC

MEGARA is the new generation IFU and MOS optical spectrograph built for the 10.4m Gran Telescopio CANARIAS (GTC). The project was developed by a consortium led by UCM (Spain) that also includes INAOE (Mexico), IAA-CSIC (Spain) and UPM (Spain). The instrument arrived to GTC on March 28th 2017 and was successfully integrated and commissioned at the telescope from May to August 2017. During the on-sky commissioning we demonstrated that MEGARA is a powerful and robust instrument that provides on-sky intermediate-to-high spectral resolutions RFWHM ~ 6,000, 12,000 and 20,000 at an unprecedented efficiency for these resolving powers in both its IFU and MOS modes. The IFU covers 12.5 x 11.3 arcsec 2 while the MOS mode allows observing up to 92 objects in a region of 3.5 x 3.5 arcmin 2 . In this paper we describe the instrument main subsystems, including the Folded-Cassegrain unit, the fiber link, the spectrograph, the cryostat, the detector and the control subsystems, and its performance numbers obtained during commissioning where the fulfillment of the instrument requirements is demonstrated. © 2018 SPIE

First scientific observations with MEGARA at GTC

On June 25th 2017, the new intermediate-resolution optical IFU and MOS of the 10.4-m GTC had its first light. As part of the tests carried out to verify the performance of the instrument in its two modes (IFU and MOS) and 18 spectral setups (identical number of VPHs with resolutions R=6000-20000 from 0.36 to 1 micron) a number of astronomical objects were observed. These observations show that MEGARA@GTC is called to fill a niche of high-throughput, intermediateresolution IFU and MOS observations of extremely-faint narrow-lined objects. Lyman-α absorbers, star-forming dwarfs or even weak absorptions in stellar spectra in our Galaxy or in the Local Group can now be explored to a new level. Thus, the versatility of MEGARA in terms of observing modes and spectral resolution and coverage will allow GTC to go beyond current observational limits in either depth or precision for all these objects. The results to be presented in this talk clearly demonstrate the potential of MEGARA in this regard

Nutrient loading of forest tree seedlings to promote stress resistance and field performance:a Mediterranean perspective

The planting environment of Mediterranean areas is highly challenging as summer drought and winter frost jeopardize survival, and soil infertility limits establishment success. We review the potential for seedling nutrient loading to alleviate these post-planting stresses. A growing body of evidence indicates that nitrogen (N) rich seedlings have improved field performance in Mediterranean environments, due to their ability to grow new roots rapidly and out-compete weeds. In addition, frost resistance during hardening is crucial for relatively cold inland nurseries; recent research shows a positive relationship between N and shoot frost resistance though a knowledge gap exists regarding the influence of nutrition on root frost resistance. Some new evidence also implicates phosphorus as an important driver of seedling response in the Mediterranean due to its influence on root growth and physiology. Nutrient status influences other functional attributes critical to survival in Mediterranean areas, such as drought tolerance, root hydraulic conductivity, and mycorrhization. In light of the apparent benefits of high nutrient reserves for seedling performance in Mediterranean areas, we also review techniques for nursery nutrient loading. Exponential fertilization can be applied when species’ growth patterns match this application regime. However, many Mediterranean species exhibit episodic growth indicating that constant or fall fertilization could be more effective in reaching loading. In particular, late-season fertilization has shown good potential to avert nutrient dilution in the fall and increase frost resistance. Several needs for future research are identified, with special emphasis on the necessity to match fertilization regimes to species ecological traits and planting conditions