Punctuated ecological equilibrium in mammal communities over evolutionary time scales

Science ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 372 (6539) ◽  
pp. 300-303 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fernando Blanco ◽  
Joaquín Calatayud ◽  
David M. Martín-Perea ◽  
M. Soledad Domingo ◽  
Iris Menéndez ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Ecosystem Functioning ◽  
Extinction Risk ◽  
Evolutionary Time ◽  
Deep Time ◽  
The Past ◽  
Ecological Equilibrium ◽  
Functional Richness ◽  
The Face ◽  
Mammal Communities ◽  
Conservation Decisions

The study of deep-time ecological dynamics has the ability to inform conservation decisions by anticipating the behavior of ecosystems millions of years into the future. Using network analysis and an exceptional fossil dataset spanning the past 21 million years, we show that mammalian ecological assemblages undergo long periods of functional stasis, notwithstanding high taxonomic volatility due to dispersal, speciation, and extinction. Higher functional richness and diversity promoted the persistence of functional faunas despite species extinction risk being indistinguishable among these different faunas. These findings, and the large mismatch between functional and taxonomic successions, indicate that although safeguarding functional diversity may or may not minimize species losses, it would certainly enhance the persistence of ecosystem functioning in the face of future disturbances.

scholarly journals Bird assemblage vulnerability depends on the diversity and biogeographic histories of islands

2016 ◽  
Vol 113 (36) ◽  
pp. 10109-10114 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brian C. Weeks ◽  
Nichar Gregory ◽  
Shahid Naeem
Keyword(s):  
Ecosystem Functioning ◽  
Positive Association ◽  
Biodiversity Loss ◽  
Vulnerable Species ◽  
Evolutionary Time ◽  
Ecological Processes ◽  
Biogeographic History ◽  
The Face ◽  
Bird Assemblage ◽  
Robust Systems

Biodiversity is widely acknowledged to influence the magnitude and stability of a large array of ecosystem properties, with biodiverse systems thought to be more functionally robust. As such, diverse systems may be safer harbors for vulnerable species, resulting in a positive association between biodiversity and the collective vulnerability of species in an assemblage, or “assemblage vulnerability.” We find that, for 35 islands across Northern Melanesia, bird assemblage vulnerability and biodiversity are positively associated. This relationship is highly contingent on Pleistocene connectivity, suggesting that biogeographic history—a factor often overlooked in biodiversity and ecosystem-functioning studies—may influence contemporary ecological processes. In the face of biodiversity loss attributable to anthropogenic drivers, reduced ecosystem functioning may erode the safe harbors of vulnerable assemblages. Paradoxically, these results suggest that biodiverse systems, as more robust systems, may experience greater biodiversity loss over ecological time because they harbor more vulnerable species accumulated over evolutionary time.

Epilogue: On the Current and Future State of Historical Writing

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Allan Megill
Keyword(s):  
Historical Writing ◽  
Conceptual Difficulty ◽  
Universal History ◽  
The Past ◽  
Initial Decision ◽  
Future State ◽  
The Face ◽  
History Of

This epilogue argues that historians ought to be able to produce a universal history, one that would ‘cover’ the past of humankind ‘as a whole’. However, aside from the always increasing difficulty of mastering the factual material that such an undertaking requires, there exists another difficulty: the coherence of universal history always presupposes an initial decision not to write about the human past in all its multiplicity, but to focus on one aspect of that past. Nevertheless, the lure of universal history will persist, even in the face of its practical and conceptual difficulty. Certainly, it is possible to imagine a future ideological convergence among humans that would enable them to accept, as authoritative, one history of humankind.

Maxillofacial Bony Considerations in Facial Transplantation

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aurora G. Vincent ◽  
Anne E. Gunter ◽  
Yadranko Ducic ◽  
Likith Reddy
Keyword(s):  
Soft Tissue ◽  
Current Literature ◽  
Preoperative Planning ◽  
Surgical Anatomy ◽  
The Past ◽  
Facial Transplantation ◽  
Tissue Transfer ◽  
Reconstructive Ladder ◽  
The Face ◽  
Facial Wounds

AbstractAlloplastic facial transplantation has become a new rung on the proverbial reconstructive ladder for severe facial wounds in the past couple of decades. Since the first transfer including bony components in 2006, numerous facial allotransplantations across many countries have been successfully performed, many incorporating multiple bony elements of the face. There are many unique considerations to facial transplantation of bone, however, beyond the considerations of simple soft tissue transfer. Herein, we review the current literature and considerations specific to bony facial transplantation focusing on the pertinent surgical anatomy, preoperative planning needs, intraoperative harvest and inset considerations, and postoperative protocols.

scholarly journals Deep-Emotion: Facial Expression Recognition Using Attentional Convolutional Network

Sensors ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (9) ◽  
pp. 3046
Author(s):  
Shervin Minaee ◽  
Mehdi Minaei ◽  
Amirali Abdolrashidi
Keyword(s):  
Deep Learning ◽  
Facial Expression ◽  
Facial Expression Recognition ◽  
Expression Recognition ◽  
Visualization Technique ◽  
Convolutional Network ◽  
The Past ◽  
Multiple Datasets ◽  
The Face ◽  
Traditional Approaches

Facial expression recognition has been an active area of research over the past few decades, and it is still challenging due to the high intra-class variation. Traditional approaches for this problem rely on hand-crafted features such as SIFT, HOG, and LBP, followed by a classifier trained on a database of images or videos. Most of these works perform reasonably well on datasets of images captured in a controlled condition but fail to perform as well on more challenging datasets with more image variation and partial faces. In recent years, several works proposed an end-to-end framework for facial expression recognition using deep learning models. Despite the better performance of these works, there are still much room for improvement. In this work, we propose a deep learning approach based on attentional convolutional network that is able to focus on important parts of the face and achieves significant improvement over previous models on multiple datasets, including FER-2013, CK+, FERG, and JAFFE. We also use a visualization technique that is able to find important facial regions to detect different emotions based on the classifier’s output. Through experimental results, we show that different emotions are sensitive to different parts of the face.

scholarly journals Extinction Risk Assessment of the Greek Endemic Flora

Biology ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
pp. 195 ◽  
Author(s):  
Konstantinos Kougioumoutzis ◽  
Ioannis P. Kokkoris ◽  
Maria Panitsa ◽  
Arne Strid ◽  
Panayotis Dimopoulos
Keyword(s):  
Risk Assessment ◽  
Land Use ◽  
Protected Area ◽  
Extinction Risk ◽  
Endemic Plant ◽  
The Past ◽  
Extinction Risk Assessment ◽  
Endemic Flora ◽  
Biodiversity Decline ◽  
Iucn Criteria

Human-induced biodiversity decline has been on the rise for the past 250 years, due to various causes. What is equally troubling, is that we are unaware which plants are threatened and where they occur. Thus, we are far from reaching Aichi Biodiversity Target 2, i.e., assessing the extinction risk of most species. To that end, based on an extensive occurrence dataset, we performed an extinction risk assessment according to the IUCN Criteria A and B for all the endemic plant taxa occurring in Greece, one of the most biodiverse countries in Europe, in a phylogenetically-informed framework and identified the areas needing conservation prioritization. Several of the Greek endemics are threatened with extinction and fourteen endemics need to be prioritized, as they are evolutionary distinct and globally endangered. Mt. Gramos is identified as the most important conservation hotspot in Greece. However, a significant portion of the identified conservation hotspots is not included in any designated Greek protected area, meaning that the Greek protected areas network might need to be at least partially redesigned. In the Anthropocene era, where climate and land-use change are projected to alter biodiversity patterns and may force many species to extinction, our assessment provides the baseline for future conservation research, ecosystem services maintenance, and might prove crucial for the timely, systematic and effective aversion of plant extinctions in Greece.

scholarly journals Chronic (Rasmussen’s) Encephalitis in an Adult

2003 ◽  
Vol 30 (3) ◽  
pp. 263-265 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Wennberg ◽  
Sukriti Nag ◽  
Mary-Pat McAndrews ◽  
Andres M. Lozano ◽  
Richard Farb ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Visual Field ◽  
Right Visual Field ◽  
Loss Of Consciousness ◽  
Mild Head Injury ◽  
Partial Seizures ◽  
Complex Partial Seizures ◽  
The Past ◽  
Rasmussen’S Encephalitis ◽  
The Face ◽  
The Right

A 24-year-old woman was referred because of incompletely-controlled complex partial seizures. Her seizures had started at age 21, after a mild head injury with brief loss of consciousness incurred in a biking accident, and were characterized by a sensation of bright flashing lights in the right visual field, followed by numbness and tingling in the right foot, spreading up the leg and to the arm, ultimately involving the entire right side, including the face. Occasionally they spread further to involve right facial twitching with jerking of the right arm and leg, loss of awareness and, at the onset of her epilepsy, rare secondarily generalized convulsions. Seizure frequency averaged three to four per month. She was initially treated with phenytoin and clobazam and subsequently changed to carbamazepine 800 milligrams per day. She also complained that her right side was no longer as strong as her left and that it was also numb, especially the leg, but felt that this weakness had stabilized or improved slightly over the past two years.

The Zeitgeist of Matthew Arnold

PMLA ◽  
1957 ◽  
Vol 72 (5) ◽  
pp. 977-996 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fraser Neiman
Keyword(s):  
Matthew Arnold ◽  
Natural Right ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Face

At least since Matthew Arnold exploited the term Zeitgeist in Literature and Dogma, the expression has been variously a source of irritation and confusion to a number of his critics. Identifying it with a tendency to disparage the past, an exasperated contemporary reviewer of that work in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine cried, “Can anything be more unscientific than such a spirit? It is the very apotheosis of self-opinion intoxicated by its own pride, and flaunting its own dogmatisms with a crude audacity in the face of preceding dogmas.” Among other critics of Arnold, R. H. Hutton protested that the Zeitgeist was a will-o'-the-wisp “who misleads us at least as much as he enlightens”; W. H. Dawson concluded that for Arnold it was “a fetish, a talisman, a thaumaturgy”; for W. H. Paul it became a bore; Hugh Kingsmill began his caricature of Don Matthew, “So forth he sallied, mounted on Zeit-Geist, a hobby horse.” Still others, less annoyed than these by the reiteration, have themselves borrowed it as they write of him—sometimes effectively, because with consistency of meaning, as H. F. Lowry in his edition of Arnold's letters to Clough; sometimes bewilderingly, as when one reads such a statement as this: “Expediency, which had become in Burke's hands an anti-revolutionary doctrine, was equated by Arnold with the Zeitgeist, a force which, in his conception of it, was quite as revolutionary as that of natural right.”

Some Tips on Face-Lifting

1979 ◽  
Vol 87 (4) ◽  
pp. 522-532 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jack R. Anderson ◽  
Calvin M. Johnson
Keyword(s):  
Surgical Procedure ◽  
Face Lift ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Face

The face-lift operation is not difficult for the well-trained otolaryngologist. However, as in every surgical procedure, there are certain techniques that facilitate its performance and improve results. This paper discusses some of these techniques that have been developed during the past 20 years.

Historical Demography and Epidemiology: The Meta-Narrative Challenge

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Graham Mooney
Keyword(s):  
Population Growth ◽  
Life Course ◽  
Medical History ◽  
Demographic Transition ◽  
Epidemiological Transition ◽  
Empirical Testing ◽  
The Past ◽  
Health And Illness ◽  
The Face ◽  
Migration And Health

Demography and epidemiology tend to analyse human processes in the aggregate. This article illustrates that definitions of demography and epidemiology provide some understanding of how they are typically used in medical history. The influence of demographic and epidemiological transition theories is discussed. The article mentions that extensive research into fertility behaviour in the past has dismantled many aspects of demographic transition and reveals that epidemiological transition has proved more durable in the face of empirical testing, but it is nonetheless problematically hidebound to a narrative of progress and modernization. This article also focuses on the complicated relationship between migration and health and is considered crucial for understanding patterns of population growth, health, and illness. Finally, it outlines some of the ways that innovative research on life-course experiences and famine demography has shaken the trees of long-held medical historical assumptions.

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