From rainbow snakes to 'X-Ray' fish : the nature of the recent rock painting tradition of Western Arnhem Land, Australia

Painting on rock shelter walls has occurred in Western Arnhem Land for thousands of years and continued frequently until just over twenty years ago when the last major rock artist of the region passed away. Many of the most recent paintings were produced within the lifetime of Aboriginal elders living in the area today. Not only are the circumstances under Which some paintings we produced remembered but also myths and stories associated with these and older paintings are recalled. Much can be learned about the meaning, importance and production of rock art from these Aboriginal people and this is one of the few areas in the world where such information is still available. In this study the most recent forms of rock painting are examined from both an archaeological and ethnographic perspective. In particular, paintings with internal or 'x-ray' features are scrutinized as it is these that are most visually striking for Europeans and hold the most meaning for contemporary Aborigines. It is argued that they are part of a much larger artistic tradition and that they developed in situ. Most, however, were produced in recent, freshwater times and changes through time are documented. Regional variants are also isolated and changes in the art are compared and contrasted with changes in the archaeological and environmental records of the region. Paintings of fish were found to be most frequent and important and their relationship to metaphysical beliefs is discussed. Various species are identified and the artistic conventions used to distinguish them are explained. The importance of the Rainbow Snake and depictions of this Being is reviewed and it is argued that paintings in rock shelters played a fundamental role in the expression and affirmation of the traditional belief system. Some forms of painting had other functions as well, such as providing a 'historic' record of past events, and these are outlined. It is concluded that many paintings could be used for more than one purpose and that many levels of meaning could be encoded into some forms, especially those with internal detail. It is also concluded that it was important to distinguish species in the art as this allowed people to use the paintings to illustrate ideas, experiences or myths more effectively when story telling For the more traditional Aboriginal people of Western Arnhem Land art is not only an expression of their belief but also is an expression of life. Art is a part of life and need not be distinguished from it. The paintings reveal complex notions about the nature of Aboriginal existence, experience and metaphysics as well as the economic and religious importance of various animals within it. By studying the art and examining how it is interrelated with myth, ritual and belief a more thorough understanding of abstract concepts such as the 'Dreaming' and 'Rainbowness' is attained. Furthermore, the importance of expressing Ancestral, 'Rainbow' power visually becomes apparent as it is this that adds life to creatures and potency to paintings

The world from Malarrak: Depictions of South-East Asian and European subjects in rock art from the Wellington Range, Australia

This paper investigates contact histories in northern Australia through an analysis of recent rock paintings. Around Australia Aboriginal artists have produced a unique record of their experiences of contact since the earliest encounters with South-east

RNA interference and nonviral targeted gene therapy of experimental brain cancer

According to isotopic labeling experiments, most of the carbon used by truffle (Tuber sp.) fruiting bodies to develop underground is provided by host trees, suggesting that trees and truffles are physically connected. However, such physical link between trees and truffle fruiting bodies has never been observed.We discovered fruiting bodies of Tuber aestivum adhering to the walls of a belowground quarry and we took advantage of this unique situation to analyze the physical structure that supported these fruiting bodies in the open air. Observation of transversal sections of the attachment structure indicated that it was organized in ducts made of gleba-like tissue and connected to a network of hyphae traveling across soil particles.Only one mating type was detected by PCR in the gleba and in the attachment structure, suggesting that these two organs are from maternal origin, leaving open the question of the location of the opposite paternal mating type

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

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