Fossil hyaenidae from cooper’s cave, South Africa, and the palaeoenvironmental implications

Abstract: We present material of the family Hyaenidae from Cooper’s Cave, an early Pleistocene (ca 1.5 Ma) fossil-bearing site in Gauteng, South Africa. This site is exceptionally rich in Carnivora, including five species of Hyaenidae: Chasmaporthetes nitidula, Crocuta ultra, Parahyaena brunnea, Hyaena hyaena and cf. Proteles sp. This diversity is greater than that of the entire family in the modern fauna and is matched at other sites in the vicinity of Cooper’s Cave. This raises issues about time averaging and the carrying capacity of the palaeoenvironment that require resolution if we are to properly understand the environments in which Paranthropus robustus, present at Cooper’s Cave, and other early hominins evolved. In addition, the presence of several hyaenid species with bone-eating/collecting capabilities raises questions about the identity of the accumulators of fossil bone assemblages that have yet to be fully resolved

Mongoose Manor: Herpestidae remains from the Early Pleistocene Cooper’s D locality in the Cradle of Humankind, Gauteng, South Africa

Mongooses (Herpestidae) are an important component of African ecosystems, and a common constituent of southern African fossil assemblages. Despite this, mongoose fossils from the Cradle of Humankind, Gauteng, South Africa, have received relatively little interest. This paper presents the diverse mongoose craniodental assemblage from the early Pleistocene fossil locality Cooper’s D. A total of 29 mongoose specimens from five genera were identified at Cooper’s, including numerous first appearances in the Cradle or in South Africa. The exceptional mongoose assemblage at Cooper’s likely reflects the effects of an unknown taphonomic process, although mongooses follow other carnivore groups in the Cradle in displaying an apparent preference for the southern part of the Cradle. This investigation shows the value of mongooses as palaeoecological indicators and supports previous interpretations of the environment at Cooper’s as grassland with a strong woody component near a permanent water source.Palaeontological Scientific Trust (PAST); DST-NRF Centre of Excellence, Palaeosciences (CoE-Pal); the South African National Research Foundation; and the University of the Witwatersrand Postgraduate Merit Award.JNC201

MAPPING THE SURROUNDINGS AS A REQUIREMENT FOR AUTONOMOUS DRIVING

Motivated by the hype around driverless cars and the challenges of the sensor integration and data processing, this paper presents a model for using a XBox One Microsoft Kinect stereo camera as sensor for mapping the surroundings. Today, the recognition of the environment of the car is mostly done by a mix of sensors like LiDAR, RADAR and cameras. In the case of the outdoor delivery challenge Robotour 2016 with model cars in scale 1:5, it is our goal to solve the task with one camera only. To this end, a three-stage approach was developed. The test results show that our approach can detect and locate objects at a range of up to eight meters in order to incorporate them as barriers in the navigation process

Circum-Mediterranean Neogene (Miocene and Pliocene) marine-continental chronologic correlations of European mammal units

This paper is an update of Steininger et al. 1989. It is mainly concerned with the chronologic correlation of the Miocene and Pliocene European Mammal Biozonations, the "European Neogene Mammal Faunal Zones" (MN zones, for discussion see Steininger et al. 1989) and the "European Mammal Faunal Units" (Agenic, Orleanic, etc., of Fahlbusch 1975; for discussion see Steininger et al. 1989), with the new Geomagnetic Polarity Time Scale (Cande and Kent 1992; in press) and the revised Geomagnetic Polarity Time Scale, Cenozoic Geochronology, Chronostratigraphy, and Planktonic Foraminifera Zonation (Berggren et al., in press). Within the last years rapid progress has been made in dating mammal-bearing Miocene and Pliocene sediments, either by radioisotopic dating (see also Swisher et al., this volume) and/or by geomagnetic dating (see also the following articles in this volume: Bernor et al.; Kappelman et al.: Sen; and Woodburne et al.). These recent results have been incorporated into this new data base. For a more recent compilation of the Pleistocene record see Agusti 1991 and Agusti et al. 1987

Fractal Noise in Quantum Ballistic and Diffusive Lattice Systems

We demonstrate fractal noise in the quantum evolution of wave packets moving either ballistically or diffusively in periodic and quasiperiodic tight-binding lattices, respectively. For the ballistic case with various initial superpositions we obtain a space-time self-affine fractal $\Psi(x,t)$ which verify the predictions by Berry for "a particle in a box", in addition to quantum revivals. For the diffusive case self-similar fractal evolution is also obtained. These universal fractal features of quantum theory might be useful in the field of quantum information, for creating efficient quantum algorithms, and can possibly be detectable in scattering from nanostructures.Comment: 9 pages, 8 postscript figure

Mustelid and viverrid remains from the Pleistocene site of Cooper’s D, Gauteng, South Africa

Fossil mustelids and viverrids are rare in the African Pleistocene fossil record. The careful examination of sieved sediments from the well-dated Cooper’s D locality in Gauteng has revealed six new mustelid and viverrid specimens. These represent three uncommon genera – two mustelids, Propoecilogale bolti and Mellivora capensis, and a viverrid, Civettictis cf. civetta. We describe and figure these six specimens here. Cooper’sD is only the fourth African locality at which P. bolti has been identified, and it is the first of the Witwatersrand sites to contain remains of the African civet.Palaeontological Scientific Trust NRF/DST Centre of Excellence in Palaeosciences South African National Research Foundation University of the Witwatersrand Postgraduate Merit Award Liverpool John Moores University Early Career Researcher Awar

Sharing the effort of the European Green Deal among countries

In implementing the European Green Deal to align with the Paris Agreement, the EU has raised its climate ambition and in 2022 is negotiating the distribution of increased mitigation effort among Member States. Such partitioning of targets among subsidiary entities is becoming a major challenge for implementation of climate policies around the globe. We contrast the 2021 European Commission proposal - an allocation based on a singular country attribute - with transparent and reproducible methods based on three ethical principles. We go beyond traditional effort-sharing literature and explore allocations representing an aggregated least regret compromise between different EU country perspectives on a fair allocation. While the 2021 proposal represents a nuanced compromise for many countries, for others a further redistribution could be considered equitable. Whereas we apply our approach within the setting of the EU negotiations, the framework can easily be adapted to inform debates worldwide on sharing mitigation effort among subsidiary entities

Formalisierung von Expertenwissen bei der Prognose von Bodenformen in Sachsen-Anhalt

Konzeptbodenkarten sind das Ergebnis einer expertenbasierten und maßstabsspezifischen Integration von bodenkundlich relevanten Informationen unterschiedlicher und oftmals unbekannter geometrischer und semantischer Auflösung. Dazu gehören bereits existierende bodenkundliche Kartenwerke (z.B. Bodenschätzung, Forstkartierung, Projektkartierungen, Landeskartenwerke etc.), aber auch bodenkundlich relevante Zusatzinformationen (z.B. digitale Höhen- und Spektraldaten). Bei der Datenintegration kommen in zunehmenden Maße Werkzeuge der digitalen Bodenprognose zum Einsatz. Eine besondere Herausforderung besteht in der nachvollziehbaren Integration von Expertenwissen sowie in der Ableitung von Qualitätsmaßen. Thema des Vortrages ist der Prototyp des Expertensystems ProBoSA zur großmaßstäbigen Prognose von Bodenformen in Sachsen-Anhalt, das im Zuge einer vom Ministerium für Umwelt, Landwirtschaft und Energie Sachsen-Anhalt finanzierten Pilotstudie entwickelt worden ist. Das Expertensystem besteht aus den drei Modulen Merkmalstransformation (MT), Klassifikation (K) und Prognose (P). Die Module MT und K erlauben die Formalisierung von Expertenwissen. Im Modul MT werden alle verfügbaren Boden- und Zusatzdaten in Zielmerkmale mittels Transformationstabellen überführt. Zielmerkmale repräsentieren Bodenbildungsprozesse (z.B. Verbraunung) oder Substratmerkmale (z.B. Sand- oder Kalkgehalt). Die Klassifikation der Zielmerkmale erfolgt entsprechend den Klassenbeschreibungen der bodenkundlichen Kartieranleitung KA 5 mittels Fuzzy-Logik und expertenbasierter Wichtung der Eingangsdaten. Die Klassifikationsergebnisse werden durch Qualitätsmaße charakterisiert, die sich aus den Fuzzy-Klassenzugehörigkeiten ableiten. Die Qualitätsmaße dienen gleichzeitig bei der expertenbasierten Auswahl von Trainingsdatensätzen bei der Anwendung von Data Mining-Algorithmen innerhalb des P-Moduls. Das Prognosemodell wird durch eine interne Modellgenauigkeit charakterisiert. Unabhängige Teststichproben erlauben schließlich eine Einschätzung der Prognosegüte. Die Funktionalitäten sowie die Prognoseergebnisse des Expertensystems ProBoSA werden am Beispiel zweier Testgebiete in Sachsen-Anhalt vorgestellt

The electric dipole moment of the neutron in chiral perturbation theory

We calculate the electric dipole moments of the neutron and the Lambda within the framework of heavy baryon chiral perturbation theory. They are induced by strong CP-violating terms of the effective Lagrangian in the presence of the vacuum angle theta_0. The construction of such a Lagrangian is outlined and we are able to give an estimate for theta_0.Comment: 17 pages, 2 figure

Climate change induced socio-economic tipping points: review and stakeholder consultation for policy relevant research

Tipping points have become a key concept in research on climate change, indicating points of abrupt transition in biophysical systems as well as transformative changes in adaptation and mitigation strategies. However, the potential existence of tipping points in socio-economic systems has remained underexplored, whereas they might be highly policy relevant. This paper describes characteristics of climate change induced socio-economic tipping points (SETPs) to guide future research on SETPS to inform climate policy. We review existing literature to create a tipping point typology and to derive the following SETP definition: a climate change induced, abrupt change of a socio-economic system, into a new, fundamentally different state. Through stakeholder consultation, we identify 22 candidate SETP examples with policy relevance for Europe. Three of these are described in higher detail to identify their tipping point characteristics (stable states, mechanisms and abrupt change): the collapse of winter sports tourism, farmland abandonment and sea-level rise-induced migration. We find that stakeholder perceptions play an important role in describing SETPs. The role of climate drivers is difficult to isolate from other drivers because of complex interplays with socio-economic factors. In some cases, the rate of change rather than the magnitude of change causes a tipping point. The clearest SETPs are found on small system scales. On a national to continental scale, SETPs are less obvious because they are difficult to separate from their associated economic substitution effects and policy response. Some proposed adaptation measures are so transformative that their implementations can be considered an SETP in terms of 'response to climate change'. Future research can focus on identification and impact analysis of tipping points using stylized models, on the exceedance of stakeholder-defined critical thresholds in the RCP/SSP space and on the macro-economic impacts of new system states