Functional reorganization of brain regions supporting artificial grammar learning across the first half year of life.

Pre-babbling infants can track nonadjacent dependencies (NADs) in the auditory domain. While this forms a crucial prerequisite for language acquisition, the neurodevelopmental origins of this ability remain unknown. We applied functional near-infrared spectroscopy in neonates and 6- to 7-month-old infants to investigate the neural substrate supporting NAD learning and detection using tone sequences in an artificial grammar learning paradigm.

Seeds of language-like generativity in bird call combinations.

Language is unbounded in its generativity, enabling the flexible combination of words into novel sentences. Critically, these constructions are intelligible to others due to our ability to derive a sentence's compositional meaning from the semantic relationships among its components. Some animals also concatenate meaningful calls into compositional-like combinations to communicate more complex information.

Goethite and Hematite Nucleation and Growth from Ferrihydrite: Effects of Oxyanion Surface Complexes.

The presence of oxyanions, such as nitrate (NO) and phosphate (PO), regulates the nucleation and growth of goethite (Gt) and hematite (Hm) during the transformation of ferrihydrite (Fh). Our previous studies showed that oxyanion surface complexes control the rate and pathway of Fh transformation to Gt and Hm. However, how oxyanion surface complexes control the mechanism of Gt and Hm nucleation and growth during the Fh transformation is still unclear.

Cognitive constraints on vocal combinatoriality in a social bird.

A critical component of language is the ability to recombine sounds into larger structures. Although animals also reuse sound elements across call combinations to generate meaning, examples are generally limited to pairs of distinct elements, even when repertoires contain sufficient sounds to generate hundreds of combinations. This combinatoriality might be constrained by the perceptual-cognitive demands of disambiguating between complex sound sequences that share elements.

Genetic distance from wolves affects family dogs' reactions towards howls.

Domestication dramatically changes behaviour, including communication, as seen in the case of dogs (Canis familiaris) and wolves (Canis lupus). We tested the hypothesis that domestication may affect an ancient, shared communication form of canids, the howling which seems to have higher individual variation in dogs: the perception and usage of howls may be affected by the genetic relatedness of the breeds to their last common ancestor with wolves ('root distance') and by other individual features like age, sex, and reproductive status. We exposed 68 purebred dogs to wolf howl playbacks and recorded their responses.

Innovative multi-material tool use in the pant-hoot display of a chimpanzee.

'Pant-hoot displays' are a species-typical, multi-modal communicative behaviour in chimpanzees in which pant-hoot vocalisations are combined with varied behavioural displays. In both captivity and the wild, individuals commonly incorporate striking or throwing elements of their environment into these displays. In this case study, we present five videos of an unenculturated, captive, adult male chimpanzee combining a large rubber feeding tub with excelsior (wood wool) in a multi-step process, which was then integrated into the subject's pant-hoot displays as a percussive tool or 'instrument'.

Optionality in animal communication: a novel framework for examining the evolution of arbitrariness.

A critical feature of language is that the form of words need not bear any perceptual similarity to their function - these relationships can be 'arbitrary'. The capacity to process these arbitrary form-function associations facilitates the enormous expressive power of language. However, the evolutionary roots of our capacity for arbitrariness, i.

Reply to comment on "Nonadjacent dependency processing in monkeys, apes, and humans".

Rawski revisit our recent findings suggesting the latent ability to process nonadjacent dependencies ("Non-ADs") in monkeys and apes. Specifically, the authors question the relevance of our findings for the evolution of human syntax. We argue that (i) these conclusions hinge upon an assumption that language processing is necessarily hierarchical, which remains an open question, and (ii) our goal was to probe the foundational cognitive mechanisms facilitating the processing of syntactic Non-ADs-namely, the ability to recognize predictive relationships in the input.

Nonadjacent dependency processing in monkeys, apes, and humans.

The ability to track syntactic relationships between words, particularly over distances ("nonadjacent dependencies"), is a critical faculty underpinning human language, although its evolutionary origins remain poorly understood. While some monkey species are reported to process auditory nonadjacent dependencies, comparative data from apes are missing, complicating inferences regarding shared ancestry. Here, we examined nonadjacent dependency processing in common marmosets, chimpanzees, and humans using "artificial grammars": strings of arbitrary acoustic stimuli composed of adjacent (nonhumans) or nonadjacent (all species) dependencies.

An exploration of Menzerath's law in wild mountain gorilla vocal sequences.

Menzerath's law, traditionally framed as a negative relationship between the size of a structure and its constituent parts (e.g. sentences with more clauses have shorter clauses), is widespread across information-coding systems ranging from human language and the vocal and gestural sequences of primates and birds, to the building blocks of DNA, genes and proteins.

Dwarf mongoose alarm calls: investigating a complex non-human animal call.

Communication plays a vital role in the social lives of many species and varies greatly in complexity. One possible way to increase communicative complexity is by combining signals into longer sequences, which has been proposed as a mechanism allowing species with a limited repertoire to increase their communicative output. In mammals, most studies on combinatoriality have focused on vocal communication in non-human primates.

Longitudinal Evaluation of Clinical Decision Support to Improve Influenza Vaccine Uptake in an Integrated Pediatric Health Care Delivery System, Houston, Texas.

Objective: Our study retrospectively evaluated the implementation of an influenza vaccine best practice alert (BPA) in an electronic medical record within an integrated pediatric health care delivery system.

Methods: An influenza BPA was implemented throughout a large pediatric health care delivery system in Houston, TX, to improve vaccine uptake. Outcomes were measured retrospectively over 3 years of BPA implementation and compared with a control year prior to BPA implementation.

Trends and Racial Disparities of Late-Stage HIV Diagnosis: Hawaii, 2010-2016.

Objectives: To examine racial/ethnic disparities in Hawaii in stage 3 classification at HIV diagnosis and trends in such disparities from 2010 through 2016.

Methods: We analyzed data including patients' demographic information, behavioral risk factors, residential county at HIV diagnosis, and type of facility where HIV was diagnosed. Multivariable logistic regression modeling was used to examine racial/ethnic disparities in late-stage diagnoses after adjustment for known or possible confounders.

Chimpanzees demonstrate individual differences in social information use.

Studies of transmission biases in social learning have greatly informed our understanding of how behaviour patterns may diffuse through animal populations, yet within-species inter-individual variation in social information use has received little attention and remains poorly understood. We have addressed this question by examining individual performances across multiple experiments with the same population of primates. We compiled a dataset spanning 16 social learning studies (26 experimental conditions) carried out at the same study site over a 12-year period, incorporating a total of 167 chimpanzees.

Significant Hypo-Responsiveness to GPVI and CLEC-2 Agonists in Pre-Term and Full-Term Neonatal Platelets and following Immune Thrombocytopenia.

Neonatal platelets are hypo-reactive to the tyrosine kinase-linked receptor agonist collagen. Here, we have investigated whether the hypo-responsiveness is related to altered levels of glycoprotein VI (GPVI) and integrin α2β1, or to defects in downstream signalling events by comparison to platelet activation by C-type lectin-like receptor 2 (CLEC-2). GPVI and CLEC-2 activate a Src- and Syk-dependent signalling pathway upstream of phospholipase C (PLC) γ2.

Chimpanzees prioritise social information over pre-existing behaviours in a group context but not in dyads.

How animal communities arrive at homogeneous behavioural preferences is a central question for studies of cultural evolution. Here, we investigated whether chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) would relinquish a pre-existing behaviour to adopt an alternative demonstrated by an overwhelming majority of group mates; in other words, whether chimpanzees behave in a conformist manner. In each of five groups of chimpanzees (N = 37), one individual was trained on one method of opening a two-action puzzle box to obtain food, while the remaining individuals learned the alternative method.

Fibrin and D-dimer bind to monomeric GPVI.

Fibrin has recently been shown to activate platelets through the immunoglobulin receptor glycoprotein VI (GPVI). In the present study, we show that spreading of human platelets on fibrin is abolished in patients deficient in GPVI, confirming that fibrin activates human platelets through the immunoglobulin receptor. Using a series of proteolytic fragments, we show that D-dimer, but not the E fragment of fibrin, binds to GPVI and that immobilized D-dimer induces platelet spreading through activation of Src and Syk tyrosine kinases.

The podoplanin-CLEC-2 axis inhibits inflammation in sepsis.

Platelets play a critical role in vascular inflammation through the podoplanin and collagen/fibrin receptors, C-type-lectin-like-2 (CLEC-2) and glycoprotein VI (GPVI), respectively. Both receptors regulate endothelial permeability and prevent peri-vascular bleeding in inflammation. Here we show that platelet-specific deletion of CLEC-2 but not GPVI leads to enhanced systemic inflammation and accelerated organ injury in two mouse models of sepsis-intra-peritoneal lipopolysaccharide and cecal ligation and puncture.

Socially transmitted diffusion of a novel behavior from subordinate chimpanzees.

Chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) demonstrate much cultural diversity in the wild, yet a majority of novel behaviors do not become group-wide traditions. Since many such novel behaviors are introduced by low-ranking individuals, a bias toward copying dominant individuals ("rank-bias") has been proposed as an explanation for their limited diffusion. Previous experimental work showed that chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) preferentially copy dominant over low-rank models.

Carbon dioxide capture using Escherichia coli expressing carbonic anhydrase in a foam bioreactor.

The present study reports CO2 capture and conversion to bicarbonate using Escherichia coli expressing carbonic anhydrase (CA) on its cell surface in a novel foam bioreactor. The very large gas-liquid interfacial area in the foam bioreactor promoted rapid CO2 absorption while the CO2 in the aqueous phase was subsequently converted to bicarbonate ions by the CA. CO2 gas removal in air was investigated at various conditions such as gas velocity, cell density and CO2 inlet concentration.

Reply to Fischer et al.

We welcome the correspondence from Fischer and colleagues regarding our recent paper on vocal learning in chimpanzee food grunts [1]. Fischer et al. make two challenges to our paper's conclusions, which we address here.

Fibrin activates GPVI in human and mouse platelets.

The glycoprotein VI (GPVI)-Fc receptor γ (FcRγ) chain is the major platelet signaling receptor for collagen. Paradoxically, in a FeCl3 injury model, occlusion, but not initiation of thrombus formation, is delayed in GPVI-deficient and GPVI-depleted mice. In this study, we demonstrate that GPVI is a receptor for fibrin and speculate that this contributes to development of an occlusive thrombus.