Assessing microhabitat, landscape features and intraguild relationships in the occupancy of the enigmatic and threatened Andean tiger cat (Leopardus tigrinus pardinoides) in the cloud forests of northwestern Colombia.

Mesocarnivores play a key role in ecosystem dynamics through the regulation of prey populations and are sensitive to environmental changes; thus, they are often considered good model organisms for conservation planning. However, data regarding the factors that influence the habitat use of threatened small wild felids such as the Andean tiger cat (Leopardus tigrinus pardinoides) are scarce. We conducted a two-year survey with 58 camera trap stations to evaluate the determinants of Andean tiger cat habitat use in three protected areas in the Middle Cauca, Colombia. We developed site occupancy models and found that Andean tiger cat habitat use increased with leaf litter depth at intermediate elevations and far from human settlements. Through conditional cooccurrence models, we found that Andean tiger cat habitat use was invariant to the presence of prey or potential intraguild competitors and killers/predators, but its detectability increased when they were present and detected. This suggests that Andean tiger cats may be more likely to be detected in sites with high prey availability. We found that Andean tiger cats preferred sites with deep leaf litter, which is a particular feature of cloud forests that provides suitable conditions for ambush hunting and hiding from intraguild enemies. Our results showed that Andean tiger cats avoided human settlements, which may minimize potential mortality risks in those areas. Moreover, the restricted use of middle elevations by Andean tiger cats suggested that they could be used as a sentinel species to track the effects of climate change since their suitable habitat is likely to be projected upward in elevation. Future conservation actions must be focused on identifying and mitigating human-related threats close to the Andean tiger cat habitat while preserving microhabitat conditions and the existing networks of protected areas.

New Measurement of

Carbon and oxygen burning reactions, in particular, ^{12}C+^{12}C fusion, are important for the understanding and interpretation of the late phases of stellar evolution as well as the ignition and nucleosynthesis in cataclysmic binary systems such as type Ia supernovae and x-ray superbursts. A new measurement of this reaction has been performed at the University of Notre Dame using particle-γ coincidence techniques with SAND (a silicon detector array) at the high-intensity 5U Pelletron accelerator. New results for ^{12}C+^{12}C fusion at low energies relevant to nuclear astrophysics are reported. They show strong disagreement with a recent measurement using the indirect Trojan Horse method. The impact on the carbon burning process under astrophysical scenarios will be discussed.

Who Discovered the Binary System and Arithmetic? Did Leibniz Plagiarize Caramuel?

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716) is the self-proclaimed inventor of the binary system and is considered as such by most historians of mathematics and/or mathematicians. Really though, we owe the groundwork of today's computing not to Leibniz but to the Englishman Thomas Harriot and the Spaniard Juan Caramuel de Lobkowitz (1606-1682), whom Leibniz plagiarized. This plagiarism has been identified on the basis of several facts: Caramuel's work on the binary system is earlier than Leibniz's, Leibniz was acquainted-both directly and indirectly-with Caramuel's work and Leibniz had a natural tendency to plagiarize scientific works.

Applying data mining techniques to medical time series: an empirical case study in electroencephalography and stabilometry.

One of the major challenges in the medical domain today is how to exploit the huge amount of data that this field generates. To do this, approaches are required that are capable of discovering knowledge that is useful for decision making in the medical field. Time series are data types that are common in the medical domain and require specialized analysis techniques and tools, especially if the information of interest to specialists is concentrated within particular time series regions, known as events. This research followed the steps specified by the so-called knowledge discovery in databases (KDD) process to discover knowledge from medical time series derived from stabilometric (396 series) and electroencephalographic (200) patient electronic health records (EHR). The view offered in the paper is based on the experience gathered as part of the VIIP project. Knowledge discovery in medical time series has a number of difficulties and implications that are highlighted by illustrating the application of several techniques that cover the entire KDD process through two case studies. This paper illustrates the application of different knowledge discovery techniques for the purposes of classification within the above domains. The accuracy of this application for the two classes considered in each case is 99.86% and 98.11% for epilepsy diagnosis in the electroencephalography (EEG) domain and 99.4% and 99.1% for early-age sports talent classification in the stabilometry domain. The KDD techniques achieve better results than other traditional neural network-based classification techniques.

Near-barrier fusion of the 8B + 58Ni proton-halo system.

Fusion cross sections were measured for the exotic proton-halo nucleus 8B incident on a 58Ni target at several energies near the Coulomb barrier. This is the first experiment to report on the fusion of a proton-halo nucleus. The resulting excitation function shows a striking enhancement with respect to expectations for normal projectiles. Evidence is presented that the sum of the fusion and breakup yields saturates the total reaction cross section.

Transfer and/or breakup modes in the 6He+209Bi reaction near the coulomb barrier

Reaction products from the interaction of 6He with 209Bi have been measured at energies near the Coulomb barrier. A 4He group of remarkable intensity, which dominates the total reaction cross section, has been observed. The angular distribution of the group suggests that it results primarily from a direct nuclear process. It is likely that this transfer and/or breakup channel is the doorway state that accounts for the previously observed large sub-barrier fusion enhancement in this system.