18 research outputs found
A Comprehensive Phylogenetic Analysis of the Scleractinia (Cnidaria, Anthozoa) Based on Mitochondrial CO1 Sequence Data
Classical morphological taxonomy places the approximately 1400 recognized species of Scleractinia (hard corals) into 27 families, but many aspects of coral evolution remain unclear despite the application of molecular phylogenetic methods. In part, this may be a consequence of such studies focusing on the reef-building (shallow water and zooxanthellate) Scleractinia, and largely ignoring the large number of deep-sea species. To better understand broad patterns of coral evolution, we generated molecular data for a broad and representative range of deep sea scleractinians collected off New Caledonia and Australia during the last decade, and conducted the most comprehensive molecular phylogenetic analysis to date of the order Scleractinia.Partial (595 bp) sequences of the mitochondrial cytochrome oxidase subunit 1 (CO1) gene were determined for 65 deep-sea (azooxanthellate) scleractinians and 11 shallow-water species. These new data were aligned with 158 published sequences, generating a 234 taxon dataset representing 25 of the 27 currently recognized scleractinian families.There was a striking discrepancy between the taxonomic validity of coral families consisting predominantly of deep-sea or shallow-water species. Most families composed predominantly of deep-sea azooxanthellate species were monophyletic in both maximum likelihood and Bayesian analyses but, by contrast (and consistent with previous studies), most families composed predominantly of shallow-water zooxanthellate taxa were polyphyletic, although Acroporidae, Poritidae, Pocilloporidae, and Fungiidae were exceptions to this general pattern. One factor contributing to this inconsistency may be the greater environmental stability of deep-sea environments, effectively removing taxonomic "noise" contributed by phenotypic plasticity. Our phylogenetic analyses imply that the most basal extant scleractinians are azooxanthellate solitary corals from deep-water, their divergence predating that of the robust and complex corals. Deep-sea corals are likely to be critical to understanding anthozoan evolution and the origins of the Scleractinia
Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search
Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe
Historical vanishing of the Blazhko effect of RR Lyr from the GEOS and Kepler surveys
RR Lyr is one of the most studied variable stars. Its light curve has been regularly monitored since the discovery of its periodic variability in 1899. The analysis of all observed maxima allows us to identify two primary pulsation states, defined as pulsation over a long (P0 longer than 0.56684 d) and a short (P0 shorter than 0.56682 d) primary pulsation period. These states alternate with intervals of 13-16 yr, and are well defined after 1943. The 40.8-d periodical modulations of the amplitude and the period (i.e. the Blazhko effect) were noticed in 1916. We provide homogeneous determinations of the Blazhko period in the different primary pulsation states. The Blazhko period does not follow the variations of P0 and suddenly diminished from 40.8 d to around 39.0 d in 1975. The monitoring of these periodicities deserved, and still deserves, a continuous and intensive observational effort. For this purpose, we have built dedicated, transportable and autonomous small instruments, Very Tiny Telescopes (VTTs), to observe the times of maximum brightness of RR Lyr. As immediate results, the VTTs recorded the last change of the P0 state in mid-2009 and extended the time coverage of the Kepler observations, thus recording a maximum O - C amplitude of the Blazhko effect at the end of 2008, followed by the historically smallest O - C amplitude in late 2013. This decrease is still ongoing and the VTTs are ready to monitor the expected increase in the next few years.10 pages, 6 figures. Accepted for publication in MNRAS. Contents of
appendix B may be requested to first authorstatus: publishe
Recommended from our members
Reviews of Books
AZAR GAT. War in Human Civilization. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2006. Pp. xv, 822. 27.95 (us). Reviewed by Noreen Humble
VICTOR H. MAIR, ed. Contact and Exchange in the Ancient World. Honolulu, HI: University of Hawaii Press, 2006. Pp. ix, 310. 90.00 (us). Reviewed by Paul Bushkovitch
NAOMI STANDEN. Unbounded Loyalty: Frontier Crossing in Liao China. Honolulu, HI: University of Hawaii Press, 2007. Pp. xiii, 279. 35.00 (us). Reviewed by John France
BJÖRN K. U. WEILER. Henry HI of England and the Staufen Empire, 1216-1272. Woodbridge, UK: Boydell Press for The Royal Historical Society, 2006. Pp. xi, 247. 35.00 (us). Reviewed by Richard L. Kagan
LEO K. SHIN. The Making of the Chinese State: Ethnicity and Expansion on the Ming Borderlands. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Pp. xxi, 246. 82.50 (us). Reviewed by Felipe Fernández-Armesto
ANDRE THEVET. Histoire: D'André Thevet Angoumoisin, Cosmographe du Roy, de deux voyages par luyfaits aux Indes Australes, et Occidentals, ed. Jean-Claude La-borie and Frank Lestringant. Geneva: Librairie Droz, 2006. Pp. 496. CHF. 153.60. Reviewed by Margaret Sankey
JESSICA L. HARLAND-JACOBS. Builders oj Empire: Freemasons and British Imperialism, 1777-1927. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2007. Pp. xiv, 384. 50.00 (us). Reviewed by Jennifer Mori
CYNTHIA RADDING. Landscapes of Power and Identity: Comparative Histories in the Sonoran Desert and the Forests of Amazonia from Colony to Republic. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2005. Pp. xxiv, 431. 45.00 (us). Reviewed by James N. Nason
JEREMY ADELMAN. Sovereignty and Revolution in the Iberian Atlantic. Princeton, NJ and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2006. Pp. x, 409. 300.00 (us), 2 vol. set. Reviewed by Eric Van Young
MAN-HOUNG LIN. China Upside Down: Currency, Society, and Ideologies, 1808-1856. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2006. Pp. xxvi, 362. 21.95 (us), paper. Reviewed by Christopher Schmidt-Nowara
ALAIN LE PICHON, ed. China Trade and Empire: Jardine, Matheson & Co. and the Origins of British Rule in Hong Kong, 1827-1843. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2006. Pp. xvii, 626. 95.00 (us). Reviewed by Alan Booth
ERIC T.JENNINGS. Curing the Colonizers: Hydrotherapy, Climatology, and French Colonial Spas. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2006. Pp. xi, 271. 24.95 (us), paper. Reviewed by Norman Etherington
PING-HUI LIAO and DAVID DER-WEI WANG, eds. Taiwan under Japanese Colonial Rule, 1895-1945: History, Culture, Memory. New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2006. Pp. xvi, 416. 19.95 (CDN)> paper. Reviewed by Amber Lloydlangston
CLIFFORD ROSENBERG. Policing Paris: The Origins of Modern Immigration Control between the Wars. Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 2006. Pp. xviii, 241. 23.95 (us), paper. Reviewed by Sarah Ansari
UZI RABI. The Emergence of States in a Tribal Society: Oman under Sa'id bin Taymur, 1932-1970. Brighton and Portland, OR: Sussex Academic Press, 2006. Pp. xii, 299. 23.99 (us), paper. Reviewed by Roger Chickering
ROBERT B. BRYCE. Canada and the Cost of World War II: The International Operations of Canada's Department of Finance, 1939-1947, ed. Matthew J. Bellamy. Montreal, QC and Kingston, ON: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2005. Pp. xvi, 392. 34.95 (us). Reviewed by Evan Mawdsley
H. JAMES BURGWYN. Empire on the Adriatic: Mussolini's Conquest of Yugoslavia 1941-1943. New York, NY: Enigma, 2005. Pp. xxi,385. 30.00 (us). Reviewed by Calder Walton
LUMANS, VALDIS O. Latvia in World War II. New York, NY: Fordham University Press, 2006. Pp. xi, 547. 24.95 (us). Reviewed by James F. Gebhart
JEFFREY HERF. The Jewish Enemy: Nazi Propaganda during World War II and the Holocaust. Cambridge, MA and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2006. Pp. ix, 390. 29.95(us). Reviewed by Donna Harsch
FRANK CAIN. Economic Statecraft during the Cold War: European Responses to the US Trade Embargo. London and New York, NY: Routledge, 2007. Pp. xii, 211. 24.95 (us), paper. Reviewed by Joaquín Roy
NICHOLAS TARLING. Regionalism in Southeast Asia: To Foster the Political Will. London and New York, NY: Routledge, 2006. Pp. 276. 30.00 (us). Reviewed by Kenton Clymer
MARTHA BRILL OLCOTT. Central Asia's Second Chance. Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2005. Pp. xiii, 389. 16.95 (us), paper. Reviewed by James Sperling
SCOTT STRAUS. The Order of Genocide: Race, Power, and War in Rwanda. Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 2006. Pp. xiv, 273. $27.95 (us). Reviewed by Howard Adelman
BILL ONG HING. Deporting Our So
European Atlas of Natural Radiation
Natural ionizing radiation is considered as the largest contributor to the collective effective dose received by the world population. The human population is continuously exposed to ionizing radiation from several natural sources that can be classified into two broad categories: high-energy cosmic rays incident on the Earth\u2019s atmosphere and releasing secondary radiation (cosmic contribution); and radioactive nuclides generated during the formation of the Earth and still present in the Earth\u2019s crust (terrestrial contribution). Terrestrial radioactivity is mostly produced by the uranium and thorium radioactive families together with potassium. In most circumstances, radon, a noble gas produced in the radioactive decay of uranium, is the most important contributor to the total dose. This Atlas aims to present the current state of knowledge of natural radioactivity, by giving general background information, and describing its various sources. This reference material is complemented by a collection of maps of Europe displaying the levels of natural radioactivity caused by different sources. It is a compilation of contributions and reviews received from more than 80 experts in their field: they come from universities, research centres, national and European authorities and international organizations. This Atlas provides reference material and makes harmonized datasets available to the scientific community and national competent authorities. In parallel, this Atlas may serve as a tool for the public to: \u2022 familiarize itself with natural radioactivity; \u2022 be informed about the levels of natural radioactivity caused by different sources; \u2022 have a more balanced view of the annual dose received by the world population, to which natural radioactivity is the largest contributor; \u2022 and make direct comparisons between doses from natural sources of ionizing radiation and those from man-made (artificial) ones, hence to better understand the latter
Stress neuropeptide levels in adults with chest pain due to coronary artery disease: potential implications for clinical assessment
: Substance P (SP) and neuropeptide Y (NPY) are neuropeptides
involved in nociception. The study of biochemical markers of pain in
communicating critically ill coronary patients may provide insight for pain
assessment and management in critical care. Purpose of the study was to
to explore potential associations between plasma neuropeptide levels and
reported pain intensity in coronary critical care adults, in order to test the
reliability of SP measurements for objective pain assessment in critical
care