Geology and palaeontology of the Late Miocene Middle Awash valley, Afar rift, Ethiopia.

The Middle Awash study area of Ethiopia's Afar rift has yielded abundant vertebrate fossils (approximately 10,000), including several hominid taxa. The study area contains a long sedimentary record spanning Late Miocene (5.3-11.2 Myr ago) to Holocene times. Exposed in a unique tectonic and volcanic transition zone between the main Ethiopian rift (MER) and the Afar rift, sediments along the western Afar rift margin in the Middle Awash provide a unique window on the Late Miocene of Ethiopia. These deposits have now yielded the earliest hominids, described in an accompanying paper and dated here to between 5.54 and 5.77 Myr. These geological and palaeobiological data from the Middle Awash provide fresh perspectives on hominid origins and early evolution. Here we show that these earliest hominids derive from relatively wet and wooded environments that were modulated by tectonic, volcanic, climatic and geomorphic processes. A similar wooded habitat also has been suggested for the 6.0 Myr hominoid fossils recently recovered from Lukeino, Kenya. These findings require fundamental reassessment of models that invoke a significant role for global climatic change and/or savannah habitat in the origin of hominids.     

Triterpenes of toxic and non-toxic taxa of Lantana camara.

The taxa of Lantana camara toxic to animals contain lantadene A lantadene B, whereas in two non-toxic taxa other triterpenes predominate. Several new triterpenes have been characterized. Contrary to earlier claims, lantadene A and to a lesser extent lantadene B are toxic when administered intraruminally to sheep.     

一个并行程序开发环境的研究与实现

文章介绍一个面向普通ＰＣ互连构成的多处理机系统的并行程序开发环境ＰａｒａＤＫ．ＰａｒａＤＫ由并行程序设计语言ＰａｒａＣ、并行操作系统ＰａｒａＯＳ和一个并行程序调试工具组成．ＰａｒａＣ是标准Ｃ＋＋扩展了支持并行的宏与库函数而成．ＰａｒａＯＳ在ＭＳＤＯＳ基础上增加了并行处理所需功能并支持多线程．对ＰａｒａＯＳ的多线程机制和线程间同步与通信的方式作了较详细的讨论，并简要介绍了并行调试工具的功能．     

做好电力名词审定工作的体会

一 电力名词审定工作概况 电能可以实现任何能源形式的转换,可以远距离输送,十分清洁、方便、适于分散使用,是现代社会使用最广、需求增长最快的能源.电力工业是国民经济最重要的基础产业之一,对国民经济发展、技术进步和保障社会稳定起着非常重要的作用.     

Averting biodiversity collapse in tropical forest protected areas

The rapid disruption of tropical forests probably imperils global biodiversity more than any other contemporary phenomenon. With deforestation advancing quickly, protected areas are increasingly becoming final refuges for threatened species and natural ecosystem processes. However, many protected areas in the tropics are themselves vulnerable to human encroachment and other environmental stresses. As pressures mount, it is vital to know whether existing reserves can sustain their biodiversity. A critical constraint in addressing this question has been that data describing a broad array of biodiversity groups have been unavailable for a sufficiently large and representative sample of reserves. Here we present a uniquely comprehensive data set on changes over the past 20 to 30 years in 31 functional groups of species and 21 potential drivers of environmental change, for 60 protected areas stratified across the world’s major tropical regions. Our analysis reveals great variation in reserve ‘health’: about half of all reserves have been effective or performed passably, but the rest are experiencing an erosion of biodiversity that is often alarmingly widespread taxonomically and functionally. Habitat disruption, hunting and forest-product exploitation were the strongest predictors of declining reserve health. Crucially, environmental changes immediately outside reserves seemed nearly as important as those inside in determining their ecological fate, with changes inside reserves strongly mirroring those occurring around them. These findings suggest that tropical protected areas are often intimately linked ecologically to their surrounding habitats, and that a failure to stem broad-scale loss and degradation of such habitats could sharply increase the likelihood of serious biodiversity declines.     

Metal-insulator-semiconductor optoelectronic fibres

The combination of conductors, semiconductors and insulators with well-defined geometries and at prescribed length scales, while forming intimate interfaces, is essential in most functional electronic and optoelectronic devices. These are typically produced using a variety of elaborate wafer-based processes, which allow for small features, but are restricted to planar geometries and limited coverage area. In contrast, the technique of fibre drawing from a preformed reel or tube is simpler and yields extended lengths of highly uniform fibres with well-controlled geometries and good optical transport characteristics. So far, this technique has been restricted to particular materials and larger features. Here we report on the design, fabrication and characterization of fibres made of conducting, semiconducting and insulating materials in intimate contact and in a variety of geometries. We demonstrate that this approach can be used to construct a tunable fibre photodetector comprising an amorphous semiconductor core contacted by metallic microwires, and surrounded by a cylindrical-shell resonant optical cavity. Such a fibre is sensitive to illumination along its entire length (tens of meters), thus forming a photodetecting element of dimensionality one. We also construct a grid of such fibres that can identify the location of an illumination point. The advantage of this type of photodetector array is that it needs a number of elements of only order N, in contrast to the conventional order N2 for detector arrays made of photodetecting elements of dimensionality zero.