Comparative analysis of the stress and immune responses in Atlantic salmon (Salmo salar) inoculated with live and inactivated Piscirickettsia salmonis.

Piscirickettsiosis causes the highest mortality in Atlantic salmon (Salmo salar) farming, and prophylactic treatment has not provided complete protection to date. In this study, we analyzed the immune and metabolic responses of Atlantic salmon inoculated with live and inactivated Piscirickettsia salmonis, monitoring plasma markers related to immune and stress responses. The fish were inoculated with inactivated P.

A concentration of visual cortex-like neurons in prefrontal cortex.

Visual recognition is largely realized through neurons in the ventral stream, though recently, studies have suggested that ventrolateral prefrontal cortex (vlPFC) is also important for visual processing. While it is hypothesized that sensory and cognitive processes are integrated in vlPFC neurons, it is not clear how this mechanism benefits vision, or even if vlPFC neurons have properties essential for computations in visual cortex implemented via recurrence. Here, we investigated if vlPFC neurons in two male monkeys had functions comparable to visual cortex, including receptive fields, image selectivity, and the capacity to synthesize highly activating stimuli using generative networks.

Structuring adaptations: Resilience, restrictive deterrence, and the Cunningham precursor control papers.

Inspired by Giommoni's assessment of the Cunningham precursor control scholarship, we propose two concepts to help drug policy scholars think through the mechanisms that operate when market participants are faced with a change in precursor availability. The first is the concept of restrictive deterrence, that emphasizes risks mitigation strategies such as looking into changes in the frequency, methods, markets that may occur after different types of interventions. While restrictive deterrence is an improvement over current approaches in thinking through adaptations, it falls short in its narrower focus on the individual, rather than organizations or the market as a collective.

Host space, not energy or symbiont size, constrains feather mite abundance across passerine bird species.

Comprehending symbiont abundance among host species is a major ecological endeavour, and the metabolic theory of ecology has been proposed to understand what constrains symbiont populations. We parameterized metabolic theory equations to investigate how bird species' body size and the body size of their feather mites relate to mite abundance according to four potential energy (uropygial gland size) and space constraints (wing area, total length of barbs and number of feather barbs). Predictions were compared with the empirical scaling of feather mite abundance across 106 passerine bird species (26,604 individual birds sampled), using phylogenetic modelling and quantile regression.

Identification of potential invasive alien species in Spain through horizon scanning.

Invasive alien species have widespread impacts on native biodiversity and ecosystem services. Since the number of introductions worldwide is continuously rising, it is essential to prevent the entry, establishment and spread of new alien species through a systematic examination of future potential threats. Applying a three-step horizon scanning consensus method, we evaluated non-established alien species that could potentially arrive, establish and cause major ecological impact in Spain within the next 10 years.

Macaques recognize features in synthetic images derived from ventral stream neurons.

Primates can recognize features in virtually all types of images, an ability that still requires a comprehensive computational explanation. One hypothesis is that visual cortex neurons learn patterns from scenes, objects, and textures, and use these patterns to interpolate incoming visual information. We have used machine learning algorithms to instantiate visual patterns stored by neurons-we call these highly activating images prototypes.

Look twice: A generalist computational model predicts return fixations across tasks and species.

Primates constantly explore their surroundings via saccadic eye movements that bring different parts of an image into high resolution. In addition to exploring new regions in the visual field, primates also make frequent return fixations, revisiting previously foveated locations. We systematically studied a total of 44,328 return fixations out of 217,440 fixations.

Tuning landscapes of the ventral stream.

A goal in visual neuroscience is to explain how neurons respond to natural scenes. However, neurons are generally tested using simpler stimuli, often because they can be transformed smoothly, allowing the measurement of tuning functions (i.e.

Face neurons encode nonsemantic features.

The primate inferior temporal cortex contains neurons that respond more strongly to faces than to other objects. Termed “face neurons,” these neurons are thought to be selective for faces as a semantic category. However, face neurons also partly respond to clocks, fruits, and single eyes, raising the question of whether face neurons are better described as selective for visual features related to faces but dissociable from them.

Visual prototypes in the ventral stream are attuned to complexity and gaze behavior.

Early theories of efficient coding suggested the visual system could compress the world by learning to represent features where information was concentrated, such as contours. This view was validated by the discovery that neurons in posterior visual cortex respond to edges and curvature. Still, it remains unclear what other information-rich features are encoded by neurons in more anterior cortical regions (e.

Quantifying and addressing the prevalence and bias of study designs in the environmental and social sciences.

Building trust in science and evidence-based decision-making depends heavily on the credibility of studies and their findings. Researchers employ many different study designs that vary in their risk of bias to evaluate the true effect of interventions or impacts. Here, we empirically quantify, on a large scale, the prevalence of different study designs and the magnitude of bias in their estimates.

The neurons that mistook a hat for a face.

Despite evidence that context promotes the visual recognition of objects, decades of research have led to the pervasive notion that the object processing pathway in primate cortex consists of multiple areas that each process the intrinsic features of a few particular categories (e.g. faces, bodies, hands, objects, and scenes).

Evolving Images for Visual Neurons Using a Deep Generative Network Reveals Coding Principles and Neuronal Preferences.

What specific features should visual neurons encode, given the infinity of real-world images and the limited number of neurons available to represent them? We investigated neuronal selectivity in monkey inferotemporal cortex via the vast hypothesis space of a generative deep neural network, avoiding assumptions about features or semantic categories. A genetic algorithm searched this space for stimuli that maximized neuronal firing. This led to the evolution of rich synthetic images of objects with complex combinations of shapes, colors, and textures, sometimes resembling animals or familiar people, other times revealing novel patterns that did not map to any clear semantic category.

LeNRT1.1 Improves Nitrate Uptake in Grafted Tomato Plants under High Nitrogen Demand.

Grafting has become a common practice among tomato growers to obtain vigorous plants. These plants present a substantial increase in nitrogen (N) uptake from the root zone. However, the mechanisms involved in this higher uptake capacity have not been investigated.

Seeing faces is necessary for face-domain formation.

Here we report that monkeys raised without exposure to faces did not develop face domains, but did develop domains for other categories and did show normal retinotopic organization, indicating that early face deprivation leads to a highly selective cortical processing deficit. Therefore, experience must be necessary for the formation (or maintenance) of face domains. Gaze tracking revealed that control monkeys looked preferentially at faces, even at ages prior to the emergence of face domains, but face-deprived monkeys did not, indicating that face looking is not innate.

A global synthesis of the effects of diversified farming systems on arthropod diversity within fields and across agricultural landscapes.

Agricultural intensification is a leading cause of global biodiversity loss, which can reduce the provisioning of ecosystem services in managed ecosystems. Organic farming and plant diversification are farm management schemes that may mitigate potential ecological harm by increasing species richness and boosting related ecosystem services to agroecosystems. What remains unclear is the extent to which farm management schemes affect biodiversity components other than species richness, and whether impacts differ across spatial scales and landscape contexts.

Posterior Inferotemporal Cortex Cells Use Multiple Input Pathways for Shape Encoding.

In the macaque monkey brain, posterior inferior temporal (PIT) cortex cells contribute to visual object recognition. They receive concurrent inputs from visual areas V4, V3, and V2. We asked how these different anatomical pathways shape PIT response properties by deactivating them while monitoring PIT activity in two male macaques.

End-Stopping Predicts Curvature Tuning along the Ventral Stream.

Unlabelled: Neurons in primate inferotemporal cortex (IT) are clustered into patches of shared image preferences. Functional imaging has shown that these patches are activated by natural categories (e.g.

Repeatability of feather mite prevalence and intensity in passerine birds.

Understanding why host species differ so much in symbiont loads and how this depends on ecological host and symbiont traits is a major issue in the ecology of symbiosis. A first step in this inquiry is to know whether observed differences among host species are species-specific traits or more related with host-symbiont environmental conditions. Here we analysed the repeatability (R) of the intensity and the prevalence of feather mites to partition within- and among-host species variance components.

Effects of agri-environmental schemes on farmland birds: do food availability measurements improve patterns obtained from simple habitat models?

Studies evaluating agri-environmental schemes (AES) usually focus on responses of single species or functional groups. Analyses are generally based on simple habitat measurements but ignore food availability and other important factors. This can limit our understanding of the ultimate causes determining the reactions of birds to AES.

Wire marking results in a small but significant reduction in avian mortality at power lines: a BACI designed study.

Background: Collision with electric power lines is a conservation problem for many bird species. Although the implementation of flight diverters is rapidly increasing, few well-designed studies supporting the effectiveness of this costly conservation measure have been published.

Methodology/principal Findings: We provide information on the largest worldwide marking experiment to date, including carcass searches at 35 (15 experimental, 20 control) power lines totalling 72.

Meta-analysis of the effectiveness of marked wire in reducing avian collisions with power lines.

Collisions of birds with power transmission and distribution lines have been documented for many species, and cause millions of casualties worldwide. Attempts to reduce mortality from such collisions include placing bird flight diverters (i.e.

Contributions of indirect pathways to visual response properties in macaque middle temporal area MT.

The primate visual cortex exhibits a remarkable degree of interconnectivity. Each visual area receives an average of 10 to 15 inputs, many of them from cortical areas with overlapping, but not identical, functional properties. In this study, we assessed the functional significance of this anatomical parallelism to the middle temporal area (MT) of the macaque visual cortex.

Treatment and seroconversion in a cohort of children suffering from recent chronic Chagas infection in Yoro, Honduras.

Between 1999-2002, Médécins Sans Frontières-Spain implemented a project seeking to determine the efficacy and safety of benznidazole in the treatment of recent chronic Chagas disease in a cohort of seropositive children in the Yoro Department, Honduras. A total of 24,471 children were screened for Trypanosoma cruzi IgG antibodies through conventional enzyme-linked immunosorbent assays (ELISA) on filter paper. Recombinant ELISA (0.