Case Study: Effects of Ultrasonic Vocalizations on Rat Behavior and Place Cell Remapping in the Hippocampus

Spatial information is known to be encoded in the hippocampus, and small changes in the environment can alter the way that it is represented by our hippocampal place cells in a process called remapping. Hearing is an important sense that can be used to orient ourselves and react to the environment accordingly. In this case study, a rat model is used to test the effects of emotional auditory stimuli, behaviorally significant ultrasonic vocalizations (USVs) (50 kHz, emitted during play; 22 kHz, emitted during danger), on rat behavior on a linear track and place cell remapping in the hippocampus. Behaviorally, it was found that the rat slowed down significantly going in one direction on the track when exposed to these novel USVs. On a neuronal level, the firing rates of place cells trended to increase as the rat was exposed to the 50 kHz sound but not the 22 kHz sound. Some place cells remapped, and those changes either persisted or reverted after the auditory stimuli were turned off, while others did not

Inferring Word-Meaning, Morpheme-Based, and Word-Based Second Language Vocabulary Teaching Methodologies

In this study, an experiment was conducted to compare the three teaching methods: the inferring word-meaning method, the morpheme-based teaching method, and the word-based teaching method. The results showed that students taught by the inferring word-meaning method outperformed both the students taught by the morpheme-based method and the word-based method in terms of word retention. The possible reason is that the inferring word-meaning section enabled students to pay attention to and spend more time on each word. On the other hand, the disadvantage of the inferring word-meaning method is that it might not be an efficient way to teach a large amount of new vocabulary because it requires sufficient time for students to get involved with the context and the discussion of guessing words. Another drawback is that textbooks are seldom designed for the purpose of inferring word-meaning from context, which means that the teacher has to spend a substantial amount of time editing the dialogues or reading material from the textbook in order to give students more information to help them guess the meaning of each target word. For the morpheme-based teaching method and the word-based teaching method, there were no statistically significant differences observed. Students from both test groups achieved the same percentage of word retention

A Preliminary Assessment of Rural Corruption in China

Rural-related corruption in China manifests itself differently in terms of different forms and intensity over time. The preliminary findings indicate that rural-related corruption in China is a particular type of white-collar crime. It embraces a mixed dimension of political crime, economic crime, corporate crime, environmental crime, and crimes within social control systems, such as the police. The time series analysis demonstrates an increase of diversity and intensity of this corruption. It also shows that rural corruption is dynamic and its dynamics have evolved significantly over time. An analysis of the historical context identifies three distinctive stages of rural-related corruption (1995-2007; 2008-2012, and 2013-2017), from acknowledgement of the issue, to issue outbreak, to a "rampant" stage, all with consistent determinants and explanations. Evidence shows that Chinese national land use policy is among the leading explanations of rural corruption. The majority of other types of rural corruption also are rooted in land-related issues. The causes of corruption in rural China have both institutional and individual behavioral explanations, which distinguishes them from the explanations of general corruption. General criminological explanations of corruption must be modified to fit a rural context and the unique histories of particular society, which in this case, is China

Psycholinguistic Analysis of the Influence of Affective Factors on College English Learning

 There are many factors that affect college students’ English learning. In order to help college students learn English effectively, we need to analyze the corresponding factors. This paper mainly analyzes the emotional factors of college students’ English learning from the perspective of psycholinguistics, and actively explores the corresponding solutions, so as to promote the improvement of college students’ English learning ability of China

A New Hybrid Model Based on an Intelligent Optimization Algorithm and a Data Denoising Method to Make Wind Speed Predication

To mitigate the increase of anxiety resulting from the depletion of fossil fuels and destruction of the ecosystem, wind power, as the most common renewable energy, is a flourishing industry. Thus, accurate wind speed forecasting is critical for the efficient function of wind farms. However, affected by complicated influence factors in meteorology and volatile physical property, wind speed forecasting is difficult and challenging. Based on previous research efforts, an intelligent hybrid model was proposed in this paper in an attempt to tackle this difficult task. First, wavelet transform was utilized to extract the main components of the original wind speed data while eliminating noise. To make better use of the back-propagation artificial neural network, the initial parameters of the network are substituted with optimized ones, which are achieved by using the artificial fish swarm algorithm (AFSA), and the final combination model is employed to conduct wind speed forecasting. A series of data are collected from four different observation sites to test the validity of the proposed model. Through comprehensive comparison with the traditional models, the experiment results clearly indicate that the proposed hybrid model outperforms the traditional single models

Repellency Assessment of Nepeta cataria Essential Oils and Isolated Nepetalactones on Aedes aegypti.

There is an increased need for improved and affordable insect repellents to reduce transmission of rapidly spreading diseases with high mortality rates. Natural products are often used when DEET cannot be afforded or accessed and when consumers choose not to use a synthetic repellent. The essential oils from two newly bred Nepeta cataria (catnip) plants representing two different chemotypes and their respective isolated nepetalactone isomers were evaluated as mosquito repellents against Aedes aegypti mosquitoes that transmit the Zika and Dengue virus in a one choice landing rate inhibition assay. A dose response curve was generated for each treatment and a time course analysis of repellency was performed over 24 hours with a N. cataria essential oil sample. The results indicate that all essential oil samples and their respective purified nepetalactone isomers were able to achieve greater than 95% repellency. Between two and four hours, the ability to repel more than 95% of the mosquitoes diminished. At the lowest concentrations tested, the nepetalactones and crude essential oil samples were more effective than DEET at reducing the number of mosquito landings

Chaos in a Discrete Delay Population Model

This paper is concerned with chaos in a discrete delay population model. The map of the model is proved to be chaotic in the sense of both Devaney and Li-Yorke under some conditions, by employing the snap-back repeller theory. Some computer simulations are provided to visualize the theoretical result