The origins of musicality in the motion of primates.

Unlabelled: Animals communicate acoustically to report location, identity, and emotive state to conspecifics. Acoustic signals can also function as displays to potential mates and as territorial advertisement. Music and song are terms often reserved only for humans and birds, but elements of both forms of acoustic display are also found in non-human primates.

On reappearance and complexity in musical calling.

Music is especially valued in human societies, but music-like behavior in the form of song also occurs in a variety of other animal groups including primates. The calling of our primate ancestors may well have evolved into the music of modern humans via multiple selective scenarios. But efforts to uncover these influences have been hindered by the challenge of precisely defining musical behavior in a way that could be more generally applied across species.

Comparative metatranscriptomics identifies molecular bases for the physiological responses of phytoplankton to varying iron availability.

In vast expanses of the oceans, growth of large phytoplankton such as diatoms is limited by iron availability. Diatoms respond almost immediately to the delivery of iron and rapidly compose the majority of phytoplankton biomass. The molecular bases underlying the subsistence of diatoms in iron-poor waters and the plankton community dynamics that follow iron resupply remain largely unknown.

flowPhyto: enabling automated analysis of microscopic algae from continuous flow cytometric data.

Motivation: Flow cytometry is a widely used technique among biologists to study the abundances of populations of microscopic algae living in aquatic environments. A new generation of high-frequency flow cytometers collects up to several hundred samples per day and can run continuously for several weeks. Automated computational methods are needed to analyze the different phytoplankton populations present in each sample.