Toxicity of fixed oil and crude extract from sa-dao-thiam, Azadirachta excelsa (Jack) seed kernel to Aedes aegypti (L.)

The larvicidal activity of various concentrations of fixed oil and crude extract from sa-dao-thiam, Azadirachta excelsa(Jack) seed kernel was assayed on an Aedes aegypti (L.) test population under controlled laboratory conditions. Concentrationlevels of responses at 24, 48, 72, and 96 hrs were evaluated. The LC50 values of the fixed oil and the crude extract were403.6 and 518.7 ppm, respectively. One hundred percent mortality in 24 hrs-post treatment was achieved at 2,000 and 4,000ppm for the oil and crude extract, respectively. It suggested that the oil is more toxic to Ae. aegypti larvae than the crudeextract. Further investigation suggested the occurrence of molting inhibition of Ae. aegypti larvae by the fixed oil and crudeextract as indicated by the small number of emerged adults. In addition, histological study suggested that damages on theepithelial cells of the midgut could result from the effects of the oil and crude extract. Hypertrophy and degeneration of theepithelial cells were observed, resulting in a presence of some cytoplasmic material in the alimentary canal. Further studiesshould be taken into account to identify their stability and residual activity of these products under field conditions

Singing whales generate high levels of particle motion : implications for acoustic communication and hearing?

Author Posting. © The Author(s), 2016. This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here by permission of The Royal Society for personal use, not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in Biology Letters 12 (2016): 20160381, doi:10.1098/rsbl.2016.0381.Acoustic signals are fundamental to animal communication and cetaceans are often considered bioacoustic specialists. Nearly all studies of their acoustic communication focus on sound pressure measurements, overlooking the particle motion components of their communication signals. Here we characterize the levels of acoustic particle velocity (and pressure) of song produced by humpback whales. We demonstrate that whales generate acoustic fields that include significant particle velocity components that are detectable over relatively long distances sufficient to play a role in acoustic communication. We show that these signals attenuate predictably in a manner similar to pressure and that direct particle velocity measurements can provide bearings to singing whales. Whales could potentially use such information to determine the distance of signaling animals. Additionally, the vibratory nature of particle velocity may stimulate bone conduction, a hearing modality similar to other low-frequency specialized mammals, offering a parsimonious mechanism of acoustic energy transduction into the massive ossicles of whale ears. With substantial concerns regarding the effects of increasing anthropogenic ocean noise and major uncertainties surrounding mysticete hearing, these results highlight both an unexplored avenue that may be available for whale acoustic communication and the need to better understand the biological role of acoustic particle motion.WHOI’s Independent Study Award to T.A.M

Acoustic and biological trends on coral reefs off Maui, Hawaii

Author Posting. © The Author(s), 2017. This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here under a nonexclusive, irrevocable, paid-up, worldwide license granted to WHOI. It is made available for personal use, not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in Coral Reefs 37 (2018): 121-133, doi:10.1007/s00338-017-1638-x.Coral reefs are characterized by high biodiversity and evidence suggests that reef soundscapes reflect local species assemblages. To investigate how sounds produced on a given reef relate to abiotic and biotic parameters and how that relationship may change over time, an observational study was conducted between September 2014 and January 2016 at seven Hawaiian reefs that varied in coral cover, rugosity, and fish assemblages. The reefs were equipped with temperature loggers and acoustic recording devices that recorded on a 10% duty cycle. Benthic and fish visual survey data were collected four times over the course of the study. On average, reefs ranged from 0 to 80% live coral cover, although changes between surveys were noted, in particular during the major El Niño-related bleaching event of October 2015. Acoustic analyses focused on two frequency bands (50–1200 Hz and 1.8–20.5 kHz) that corresponded to the dominant spectral features of the major sound-producing taxa on these reefs, fish and snapping shrimp, respectively. In the low-frequency band, the presence of humpback whales (December– May) was a major contributor to sound level, whereas in the high-frequency band sound level closely tracked water temperature. On shorter timescales, the magnitude of the diel trend in sound production was greater than that of the lunar trend, but both varied in strength among reefs, which may reflect differences in the species assemblages present. Results indicated that the magnitude of the diel trend was related to fish densities at low frequencies and coral cover at high frequencies; however, the strength of these relationships varied by season. Thus, long-term acoustic recordings capture the substantial acoustic variability present in coral-reef ecosystems and provide insight into the presence and relative abundance of sound-producing organisms.Funding for this research was provided by the PADI Foundation, the WHOI Access To The Sea initiative and Ocean Life Institute, and the National Science Foundation grant OCE-1536782

Fluctuations in Hawaii's humpback whale Megaptera novaeangliae population inferred from male song chorusing off Maui

© The Author(s), 2020. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License. The definitive version was published in Kugler, A., Lammers, M. O., Zang, E. J., Kaplan, M. B., & Mooney, T. A. Fluctuations in Hawaii's humpback whale Megaptera novaeangliae population inferred from male song chorusing off Maui. Endangered Species Research, 43, (2020): 421-434, https://doi.org/10.3354/esr01080.Approximately half of the North Pacific humpback whale Megaptera novaeangliae stock visits the shallow waters of the main Hawaiian Islands seasonally. Within this breeding area, mature males produce an elaborate acoustic display known as song, which becomes the dominant source of ambient underwater sound between December and April. Following reports of unusually low whale numbers that began in 2015/16, we examined song chorusing recorded through long-term passive acoustic monitoring at 6 sites off Maui as a proxy for relative whale abundance between 2014 and 2019. Daily root-mean-square sound pressure levels (RMS SPLs) were calculated to compare variations in low-frequency acoustic energy (0-1.5 kHz). After 2014/15, the overall RMS SPLs decreased between 5.6 and 9.7 dB re 1 µPa2 during the peak of whale season (February and March), reducing ambient acoustic energy from chorusing by over 50%. This change in song levels co-occurred with a broad-scale oceanic heat wave in the northeast Pacific termed the ‘Blob,’ a major El Niño event in the North Pacific, and a warming period in the Pacific Decadal Oscillation cycle. Although it remains unclear whether our observations reflect a decrease in population size, a change in migration patterns, a shift in distribution to other areas, a change in the behavior of males, or some combination of these, our results indicate that continued monitoring and further studies of humpback whales throughout the North Pacific are warranted to better understand the fluctuations occurring in this recently recovered population and other populations that continue to be endangered or threatened.Funding was provided by The WHOI Access To The Sea initiative and Ocean Life Institute,National Science Foundation grant OCE-1536782, Department of Land and Natural Resources of the State of Hawai’i, Whale Tales Maui, Pride of Maui, the PADI Foundation, and the National Marine Sanctuary Foundation

Detection of Key Transient Cu Intermediates in SSZ-13 During NH₃-SCR deNOₓ by Modulation Excitation IR spectroscopy

The small pore zeolite Cu-SSZ-13 is an efficient material for the standard selective catalytic reduction of nitrogen oxides (NOₓ) by ammonia (NH₃). In this work, Cu-SSZ-13 has been studied at 250 °C under high conversion using a modulation excitation approach and analysed with phase sensitive detection (PSD). While the complementary X-ray absorption near edge structure (XANES) spectroscopy measurements showed that the experiments were performed under cyclic Cu^{+}/Cu^{2+} redox, Diffuse Reflectance Infrared Fourier Transform Spectroscopy (DRIFTS) experiments provide spectroscopic evidence for previously postulated intermediates Cu–N([double bond, length as m-dash]O)–NH_{2} and Cu–NO_{3} in the NH_{3}-SCR deNO_{x} mechanism and for the role of [Cu^{2+}(OH^{−})]^{+}

Listening forward: approaching marine biodiversity assessments using acoustic methods

© The Author(s), 2020. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License. The definitive version was published in Mooney, T. A., Di Iorio, L., Lammers, M., Lin, T., Nedelec, S. L., Parsons, M., Radford, C., Urban, E., & Stanley, J. Listening forward: approaching marine biodiversity assessments using acoustic methods. Royal Society Open Science, 7(8), (2020): 201287, doi:10.1098/rsos.201287.Ecosystems and the communities they support are changing at alarmingly rapid rates. Tracking species diversity is vital to managing these stressed habitats. Yet, quantifying and monitoring biodiversity is often challenging, especially in ocean habitats. Given that many animals make sounds, these cues travel efficiently under water, and emerging technologies are increasingly cost-effective, passive acoustics (a long-standing ocean observation method) is now a potential means of quantifying and monitoring marine biodiversity. Properly applying acoustics for biodiversity assessments is vital. Our goal here is to provide a timely consideration of emerging methods using passive acoustics to measure marine biodiversity. We provide a summary of the brief history of using passive acoustics to assess marine biodiversity and community structure, a critical assessment of the challenges faced, and outline recommended practices and considerations for acoustic biodiversity measurements. We focused on temperate and tropical seas, where much of the acoustic biodiversity work has been conducted. Overall, we suggest a cautious approach to applying current acoustic indices to assess marine biodiversity. Key needs are preliminary data and sampling sufficiently to capture the patterns and variability of a habitat. Yet with new analytical tools including source separation and supervised machine learning, there is substantial promise in marine acoustic diversity assessment methods.Funding for development of this article was provided by the collaboration of the Urban Coast Institute (Monmouth University, NJ, USA), the Program for the Human Environment (The Rockefeller University, New York, USA) and the Scientific Committee on Oceanic Research. Partial support was provided to T.A.M. from the National Science Foundation grant OCE-1536782

Integration of a Spanish-to-LSE machine translation system into an e-learning platform

The final publication is available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-21657-2_61This paper presents the first results of the integration of a Spanish-to-LSE Machine Translation (MT) system into an e-learning platform. Most e-learning platforms provide speech-based contents, which makes them inaccessible to the Deaf. To solve this issue, we have developed a MT system that translates Spanish speech-based contents into LSE. To test our MT system, we have integrated it into an e-learning tool. The e-learning tool sends the audio to our platform. The platform sends back the subtitles and a video stream with the signed translation to the e-learning tool. Preliminary results, evaluating the sign language synthesis module, show an isolated sign recognition accuracy of 97%. The sentence recognition accuracy was of 93%.Authors would like to acknowledge the FPU-UAM grant program for its financial support. Authors are grateful to the FCNSE linguistic department for sharing their knowledge in LSE and performing the evaluations. Many thanks go to María Chulvi and Benjamín Nogal for providing help during the imple-mentation of this system. This work was partially supported by the Telefónica Móviles España S.A. project number 10-047158-TE-Ed-01-1

Steering the structure and selectivity of CO₂ electroreduction catalysts by potential pulses

Convoluted selectivity trends and a missing link between reaction product distribution and catalyst properties hinder practical applications of the electrochemical CO2 reduction reaction (CO2RR) for multicarbon product generation. Here we employ operando X-ray absorption and X-ray diffraction methods with subsecond time resolution to unveil the surprising complexity of catalysts exposed to dynamic reaction conditions. We show that by using a pulsed reaction protocol consisting of alternating working and oxidizing potential periods that dynamically perturb catalysts derived from Cu2O nanocubes, one can decouple the effect of the ensemble of coexisting copper species on the product distribution. In particular, an optimized dynamic balance between oxidized and reduced copper surface species achieved within a narrow range of cathodic and anodic pulse durations resulted in a twofold increase in ethanol production compared with static CO2RR conditions. This work thus prepares the ground for steering catalyst selectivity through dynamically controlled structural and chemical transformations

Sounding the call for a global library of underwater biological sounds

© The Author(s), 2022. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License. The definitive version was published in Parsons, M., Lin, T.-H., Mooney, T., Erbe, C., Juanes, F., Lammers, M., Li, S., Linke, S., Looby, A., Nedelec, S., Van Opzeeland, I., Radford, C., Rice, A., Sayigh, L., Stanley, J., Urban, E., & Di Iorio, L. Sounding the call for a global library of underwater biological sounds. Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution, 10, (2022): 810156, https://doi.org/10.3389/fevo.2022.810156.Aquatic environments encompass the world’s most extensive habitats, rich with sounds produced by a diversity of animals. Passive acoustic monitoring (PAM) is an increasingly accessible remote sensing technology that uses hydrophones to listen to the underwater world and represents an unprecedented, non-invasive method to monitor underwater environments. This information can assist in the delineation of biologically important areas via detection of sound-producing species or characterization of ecosystem type and condition, inferred from the acoustic properties of the local soundscape. At a time when worldwide biodiversity is in significant decline and underwater soundscapes are being altered as a result of anthropogenic impacts, there is a need to document, quantify, and understand biotic sound sources–potentially before they disappear. A significant step toward these goals is the development of a web-based, open-access platform that provides: (1) a reference library of known and unknown biological sound sources (by integrating and expanding existing libraries around the world); (2) a data repository portal for annotated and unannotated audio recordings of single sources and of soundscapes; (3) a training platform for artificial intelligence algorithms for signal detection and classification; and (4) a citizen science-based application for public users. Although individually, these resources are often met on regional and taxa-specific scales, many are not sustained and, collectively, an enduring global database with an integrated platform has not been realized. We discuss the benefits such a program can provide, previous calls for global data-sharing and reference libraries, and the challenges that need to be overcome to bring together bio- and ecoacousticians, bioinformaticians, propagation experts, web engineers, and signal processing specialists (e.g., artificial intelligence) with the necessary support and funding to build a sustainable and scalable platform that could address the needs of all contributors and stakeholders into the future.Support for the initial author group to meet, discuss, and build consensus on the issues within this manuscript was provided by the Scientific Committee on Oceanic Research, Monmouth University Urban Coast Institute, and Rockefeller Program for the Human Environment. The U.S. National Science Foundation supported the publication of this article through Grant OCE-1840868 to the Scientific Committee on Oceanic Research