A comparison of seedling diversity and abundance in the range of howler monkeys (Alouatta palliata) in Bocas del Toro, Panama

In this study, I investigated the potential effect of howler monkey (Alouatta palliata) defecations on the diversity and abundance of seedlings on the forest floor of a tropical lowland forest in Bocas del Toro, Panama. I conducted follows on a howler monkey group for 18 days and found six trees the monkeys used for sleeping. During this time, I collected feces and extracted the ingested seeds. I counted the seeds and identified the seed genus when possible. After this initial observation period, I constructed transects in random directions covering the entire tree crown underneath sleeping trees. I collected and counted every dicot seedling shorter than 30 cm. I identified the seedlings in the lab, to the species level when possible, and repeated the process in control transects of the same size in the same forest type, with comparable canopy cover and soil conditions. In total I identified 46 morphotypes from 967 individual seedlings, 676 underneath sleeping trees and 291 in control areas. Of the 46 morphotypes, I identified 16 to the species level, ten to the genus level, four to the family level, and 16 remain unidentified. Of these species, 12 were found exclusively in the sleeping transects, and 11 were exclusive to the control transects. I predicted that there would be greater individual seedlings and greater species richness, and diversity underneath the sleeping trees than in control areas. I also predicted that some plant species would be more prevalent underneath sleeping trees due to howler monkey dietary preferences and what was fruiting during this period. I did not observe a significant difference in seedling abundance, species richness, Shannon-Wiener diversity, or Gini-Simpson diversity (p values \u3e .05). Taking into account the life history of some clumped seedling species, I attempted to determine whether they arrived there via howler monkey endozoochory. I also examined the effects of secondary dispersers such as dung beetles and rodents, and offer suggestions for strengthening this research for future study. This study contributes to our knowledge of how howler monkeys contribute to forest flora communities, and offers an important foundation for the forest floor community for other students interested in primate seed dispersal

“My Written Books of Surgery in the Englishe Tonge”: The London Company of Barber-Surgeons and the Lylye of Medicynes

The Middle English Lylye of Medicynes is an early fifteenth-century translation of Bernard of Gordon’s Latin Lilium medicinae (completed in 1305). The Lylye is contained in Oxford Bodleian Library MS. Ashmole 1505 as a sole text. Although there are many extant witnesses in Latin, there are no other known Middle English copies. The Lylye contains thousands of medicinal ingredients, including 360 individual recipes identified with Rx, with accompanying guidelines for diagnosis and prognosis. Although the text does contain some medical theory and etiology (based on thought from Arabic medicine, specifically Ibn Sīnā, and Antiquity, predominantly Galen and Hippocrates), its main feature is the large volume of medicinal recipes. It is thought to have been commissioned by Robert Broke, ‘master of the king’s stillatories,’ in the early fifteenth century during the reign of Henry VI. This article explores the later provenance of the Lylye amongst the Gale family of barber-surgeons in sixteenth-century London

New species of dryolestoid from the late cretaceous allen formation and implications for South American faunal diversity.

Dryolestoids are extinct cladotherians mammals from the Jurassic and Cretaceous periods. I describe a collection of dryolestoid specimens from the Late Cretaceous localities of Cerro Tortuga (Allen Formation), Anfiteatro 1, and Shining (both La Colonia Formation) from Patagonia, Argentina. Using comparative morphology, I identify a new species of meridiolestidan dryolestoid based on eleven specimens across both formations. The new species’ recovery from La Colonia Formation represents the first dryolestoid connection between the two approximately contemporaneous formations. The species’ morphology may represent an ecological shift within Meridiolestida from insectivory to herbivory, showing a transition in characters between the plesiomorphic sharp-toothed meridiolestidans and the more derived and bunodont mesungulatoids. Other specimens from Allen Formation are referred to previously described taxa, namely Mesungulatum and Groebertherium. New material fills in unknown positions in meridiolestid dentitions and suggests that genus Groebertherium—previously regarded as a dryolestid taxon—is in fact closer to Meridiolestida

Could medieval medicine help the fight against antimicrobial resistance?

The emergence of antibiotic-resistant bacteria, combined with a severely stalled discovery pipeline for new antibiotics being developed, has the potential to undo the advances in infection control achieved in the last century. One way around this impasse might be to re-explore the medicinal practices of the medieval world. Why? This is because although the medieval world was ignorant of so much of modern theory, it seems that centuries of practice by medieval doctors could have produced some treatments for infections that were effective. These could contain antimicrobial compounds suitable for development into antibiotics. Our interdisciplinary team, initially based at the University of Nottingham, tested an eyesalve described in the tenth century Anglo-Saxon ‘Bald’s Leechbook’ with startling results. By following the recipe as closely as possible, we created a cocktail that can kill one of the most common causes of eye infections, the bacterium Staphylococcus aureus. More significantly, Bald’s eyesalve can kill a range of antibiotic-resistant bacteria. This chapter details our team’s initial findings and places them in the context of an interdisciplinary analysis of how medieval doctors used the materia medica available to them. We present novel results confirming the reliability of Bald’s eyesalve as an anti-Staphylococcal agent. Further, we demonstrate the potential of ‘big data’ approaches to turn medical texts into predictive databases for selecting natural materials for antibiotic testing. Finally, we present our work as an example of how interdisciplinary dialogue can significantly advance scholarship

Data Mining a Medieval Medical Text Reveals Patterns in Ingredient Choice That Reflect Biological Activity against Infectious Agents

We used established methodologies from network science to identify patterns in medicinal ingredient combinations in a key medieval text, the 15th-century Lylye of Medicynes, focusing on recipes for topical treatments for symptoms of microbial infection. We conducted experiments screening the antimicrobial activity of selected ingredients. These experiments revealed interesting examples of ingredients that potentiated or interfered with each other’s activity and that would be useful bases for future, more detailed experiments. Our results highlight (i) the potential to use methodologies from network science to analyze medieval data sets and detect patterns of ingredient combination, (ii) the potential of interdisciplinary collaboration to reveal different aspects of the ethnopharmacology of historical medical texts, and (iii) the potential development of novel therapeutics inspired by premodern remedies in a time of increased need for new antibiotics.The pharmacopeia used by physicians and laypeople in medieval Europe has largely been dismissed as placebo or superstition. While we now recognize that some of the materia medica used by medieval physicians could have had useful biological properties, research in this area is limited by the labor-intensive process of searching and interpreting historical medical texts. Here, we demonstrate the potential power of turning medieval medical texts into contextualized electronic databases amenable to exploration by the use of an algorithm. We used established methodologies from network science to reveal patterns in ingredient selection and usage in a key text, the 15th-century Lylye of Medicynes, focusing on remedies to treat symptoms of microbial infection. In providing a worked example of data-driven textual analysis, we demonstrate the potential of this approach to encourage interdisciplinary collaboration and to shine a new light on the ethnopharmacology of historical medical texts

VisColl: A New Collation Tool for Manuscript Studies

The principal physical feature of the book in codex format, the gathering structure, is usually not visualized within digitization projects. If this information is recorded at all, it is generally done with the use of collation formulas. There is not a standard schema for manuscript collation formulas and not all practices are able to record accurately the structure of books. There have been some attempts in the past to describe gathering structures in more formalised ways. VisColl is building on past experiences and strives to describe, visualize, and communicate the gathering structure of books. Successful applications of the new tool are presented as examples. Future versions will add functionality to link physical details of a manuscript with additional information about the content, which will enable a complete mapping of a physical manuscript

Labeculæ Vivæ: Building a Reference Library of Stains for Medieval and Early Modern Manuscripts

Stains on manuscripts are signs indicative of their past lives left by time and usage. Reading these signals in concert with conventional information gathered from manuscripts can add to our understanding of the history and use of an object. This project, supported by a microgrant from the Council on Library and Information Resources, and run as a preliminary pilot study, provides an identified, open-access database of a number of commonly found stains in order to help researchers answer questions such as manuscript provenance, transmission, material culture, as well as scientific applications for arts questions and the innovative uses of multispectral imaging to acquire new knowledge. This paper presents the methodology and the results of the investigation and demonstrates best practices using the database for a diverse audience of scholars

Algebra and Geometry of Camera Resectioning

We study algebraic varieties associated with the camera resectioning problem. We characterize these resectioning varieties' multigraded vanishing ideals using Gr\"obner basis techniques. As an application, we derive and re-interpret celebrated results in geometric computer vision related to camera-point duality. We also clarify some relationships between the classical problems of optimal resectioning and triangulation, state a conjectural formula for the Euclidean distance degree of the resectioning variety, and discuss how this conjecture relates to the recently-resolved multiview conjecture.Comment: 27 page

New Opportunities for Collaboration in the Age of Digital Special Collections

This essay explores the impact of digitized and born-digital special collections on teaching, learning, and research, and, through institutional case studies, considers the variety of collaborative opportunities made possible by the digitization of special collections

A case study of the Ancientbiotics collaboration

Collaborations that cross traditional boundaries between disciplines in STEM and the arts and humanities open up exciting research possibilities. In our team’s case, we combined expertise in historical manuscripts, data science, and microbiology to explore the structure and potential efficacy of historical medical recipes. Such an approach can highlight patterns or questions that a single-disciplinary approach is likely to miss. But learning to speak each other’s disciplinary languages is not always easy, and misunderstandings can impede work. Here, we present our own experiences as a case study of how we have learned from each other to ask new questions of our source material and the problems we have had to solve along the way