Social rank overrides environmental and community fluctuations in determining meat access by female chimpanzees in the Taï National Park, Côte d’Ivoire

Meat, long hypothesized as an important food source in human evolution, is still a substantial component of the modern human diet, with some humans relying entirely on meat during certain times of the year. Understanding the socio-ecological context leading to the successful acquisition and consumption of meat by chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes), our closest living relative, can provide insight into the emergence of this trait because humans and chimpanzees are unusual among primates in that they both (i) hunt mammalian prey, (ii) share meat with community members, and (iii) form long-term relationships and complex social hierarchies within their communities. However, females in both human hunter-gatherer societies as well as chimpanzee groups rarely hunt, instead typically accessing meat via males that share meat with group members. In general, female chimpanzee dominance rank affects feeding competition, but so far, the effect of female dominance rank on meat access found different results within and across studied chimpanzee groups. Here we contribute to the debate on how female rank influences meat access while controlling for several socio-ecological variables. Multivariate analyses of 773 separate meat-eating events collected over more than 25 years from two chimpanzee communities located in the Taï National Park, Côte d’Ivoire, were used to test the importance of female dominance rank for being present at, and for acquiring meat, during meat-eating events. We found that high-ranking females were more likely to be present during a meat-eating event and, in addition, were more likely to eat meat compared to the subordinates. These findings were robust to both large demographic changes (decrease of community size) and seasonal ecological changes (fruit abundance dynamics). In addition to social rank, we found that other female properties had a positive influence on presence to meat-eating events and access to meat given presence, including oestrus status, nursing of a small infant, and age. Similar to findings in other chimpanzee populations, our results suggest that females reliably acquire meat over their lifetime despite rarely being active hunters. The implication of this study supports the hypothesis that dominance rank is an important female chimpanzee property conferring benefits for the high-ranking females

Pressure-Induced Superconductivity in Sc to 74 GPa

Using a diamond anvil cell with nearly hydrostatic helium pressure medium we have significantly extended the superconducting phase diagram Tc(P) of Sc, the lightest of all transition metals. We find that superconductivity is induced in Sc under pressure, Tc increasing monotonically to 8.2 K at 74.2 GPa. The Tc(P) dependences of the trivalent d-electron metals Sc, Y, La, and Lu are compared and discussed within a simple s-d charge transfer framework.Comment: to be published in Phys. Rev. B (Brief Reports

A Bibliometric Analysis of the Great Commission Research Journal 2009-2019

The Great Commission Research Journal, the subject of this investigation, is a relatively new journal with roots in the past. It is a successor to two previous publications from the American Society for Church Growth. A bibliometric analysis of the journal’s first ten volumes is presented on two levels. The first is a content analysis of the surface features of the publication such as the authors’ education, academic credentials, and employment, the number of full-length articles published, the subjects covered in each article, and other features such as the average length of articles, number of footnote references, and number of graphic representations. The second level of investigation, using citation analysis, focused on referenced authors, books, book chapters, and journal articles. Comparisons with past studies of religious journals were also made. Books are most frequently cited, and journal articles are relatively seldomly cited

Biomass and grazing potential of the Stipa loess steppes in Ningxia (northern China) in relation to grazing intensity

The mere amount of biomass is not a suitable measuring unit for the economic value of a plant community, because not all species are equally appreciated by cattle and sheep and some are even unpalatable. That is why we summarised palatability and appreciation to a feeding value. Together with the biomass this feeding value was used to calculate the grazing potential of the plant communities investigated.In the Stipa loess steppes of Ningxia (northern China) the two characteristic feather grasses dominating in ungrazed or slightly grazed areas are estimated as species of very high feeding value. Those species, which show increasing biomass parallel to increasing grazing intensity are of lower feeding value. Except of overgrazed areas, the Stipa grandis steppes have a higher grazing potential than the Stipa bungeana communities. A comparison of biomass and grazing potential shows that the relative differences between the grazing potential of the communities existing at different grazing levels are much higher than the relative differences in biomass

Oenothera-Arten auf Industriebrachen im westfälischen Ruhrgebiet

During a botanical inventory of ten abandoned industrial sites in the Ruhr area, a total of seven Oenotheratribes were demonstrate

Density of high area-to-mass objects in Geostationary and Medium Earth orbits through semi-analytical equations and differential algebra

This paper introduces and combines two novel techniques. Firstly, we introduce an efficient numerical method for the propagation of entire sets of initial conditions in the phase space and their associated phase space densities based on Differential Algebra (DA) techniques. Secondly, this DA density propagator is applied to a DA-enabled implementation of Semi-Analytical (SA) averaged dynamics, combining for the first time the power of the SA and DA techniques. While the DA-based method for the propagation of densities introduced in this paper is independent of the dynamical system under consideration, the particular combination of DA techniques with SA equations yields a fast and accurate method to propagate large clouds of initial conditions and their associated probability density functions very efficiently for long time. This enables the study of the long-term behavior of particles subjected to the given dynamics. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method, the evolution of a cloud of high area-to-mass objects in Medium Earth Orbit is reproduced considering the effects of solar radiation pressure, the Earth’s oblateness and luni-solar perturbations. The computational efficiency is demonstrated by propagating 10; 000 random samples taking snapshots of their state and density at evenly spaced intervals throughout the integration. The total time required for a propagation for 16 years in the dynamics is on the order of tens of seconds on a common desktop PC

Non-perturbative quark mass renormalization

We show that the renormalization factor relating the renormalization group invariant quark masses to the bare quark masses computed in lattice QCD can be determined non-perturbatively. The calculation is based on an extension of a finite-size technique previously employed to compute the running coupling in quenched QCD. As a by-product we obtain the $\Lambda$--parameter in this theory with completely controlled errors.Comment: Talk given at LATTICE '97, 6 pages, Latex source, 7 eps figures, needs epsfi