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Humans in Africa’s wet tropical forests 150 thousand years ago
Get PDFHumans emerged across Africa shortly before 300 thousand years ago (ka)1–3.
Although this pan-African evolutionary process implicates diverse environments
in the human story, the role of tropical forests remains poorly understood. Here we
report a clear association between late Middle Pleistocene material culture and a wet
tropical forest in southern Côte d’Ivoire, a region of present-day rainforest. Twinned
optically stimulated luminescence and electron spin resonance dating methods
constrain the onset of human occupations at Bété I to around 150 ka, linking them
with Homo sapiens. Plant wax biomarker, stable isotope, phytolith and pollen analyses
of associated sediments all point to a wet forest environment. The results represent
the oldest yet known clear association between humans and this habitat type.
The secure attribution of stone tool assemblages with the wet forest environment
demonstrates that Africa’s forests were not a major ecological barrier for H. sapiens
as early as around 150 ka
Building a pan-European network to bridge gaps in geriatric medicine education: the PROGRAMMING COST Action 21,122-a call for endorsement.
Get PDFBACKGROUND: The growing challenges of population aging create a pressing need for specialized geriatric medicine services to effectively address the complex health needs of older adults and influence supportive healthcare policies. Older patients may present clinical complexity with multimorbidity, disability, and/or frailty, necessitating a shift from the traditional organ-oriented clinical approach to a holistic, patient-centered care model. RATIONALE OF THE ACTION: Despite recommendations from the World Health Organization and scientific and professional societies, geriatric medicine is not universally recognized as a distinct specialty in Europe, and education in this field remains heterogeneous. A notable discrepancy in the availability of geriatric services and education in this field across European countries can be found. Many healthcare professionals lack basic training in geriatric medicine, contributing to fragmented care and poorer health outcomes. To address these challenges, it is essential to integrate geriatric medicine into undergraduate and postgraduate curricula for all healthcare professionals. EXPECTED OUTCOMES: The COST Action 21,122 PROGRAMMING (PROmoting GeRiAtric Medicine in countries where it is still eMergING) initiative aims to promote geriatric medicine by developing targeted educational goals and programs and fostering interdisciplinary collaboration. This initiative aims to assess the current state of geriatric medicine education and identify both global and local educational needs for developing clinical skills among healthcare professionals. In addition, it seeks to establish consensus on core curricula tailored to local contexts and disseminate findings and recommendations to stakeholders, policymakers, and the public. By uniting diverse stakeholders, PROGRAMMING aspires to create sustainable changes in geriatric care across Europe
Practice makes perfect, especially when doing what we like.
Get PDFPrevious research has found that aesthetic appeal can facilitate visual search performance. One avenue of enquiry is that appealing icons are processed better than unappealing icons. If appealing stimuli are better processed, then it may be expected that they will benefit from practice more than their unappealing counterparts. In the current study (N = 100) we examined the effect of stimulus appeal on visual search performance. Half of the participants searched for appealing icons first, followed by unappealing icons, and the order was reversed for the other half. First, visual search performance benefited from stimulus appeal, and specifically the interaction of stimulus appeal and complexity - visual stimulus appeal led to better search performance but only for stimuli that were visually complex, with no effect of appeal for visually simple stimuli. Second, task experience benefited appealing icons more than unappealing icons. These results extend current knowledge of the status of visual aesthetic appeal on performance. They provide new evidence that appealing stimuli benefit from practice and are easier to learn compared to their unappealing counterparts
Shared neural dynamics of facial expression processing.
Get PDFThe ability to recognize and interpret facial expressions is fundamental to human social cognition, enabling navigation of complex interpersonal interactions and understanding of others' emotional states. The extent to which neural patterns associated with facial expression processing are shared between observers remains unexplored, and no study has yet examined the neural dynamics specific to different emotional expressions. Additionally, the neural processing dynamics of facial attributes such as sex and identity in relation to facial expressions have not been thoroughly investigated. In this study, we investigated the shared neural dynamics of emotional face processing using an explicit facial emotion recognition task, where participants made two-alternative forced choice (2AFC) decisions on the displayed emotion. Our data-driven approach employed cross-participant multivariate classification and representational dissimilarity analysis on EEG data. The results demonstrate that EEG signals can effectively decode the sex, emotional expression, and identity of face stimuli across different stimuli and participants, indicating shared neural codes for facial expression processing. Multivariate classification analyses revealed that sex is decoded first, followed by identity, and then emotion. Emotional expressions (angry, happy, sad) were decoded earlier when contrasted with neutral expressions. While identity and sex information were modulated by image-level stimulus features, the effects of emotion were independent of visual image properties. Importantly, our findings suggest enhanced processing of face identity and sex for emotional expressions, particularly for angry faces and, to a lesser extent, happy faces
Online peer support for people with dementia: a scoping review protocol.
Get PDFOBJECTIVE: The objective of this scoping review is to gain insights into the different online peer support opportunities available for people with dementia. INTRODUCTION: People with dementia use a variety of online platforms for peer support, such as social networking sites or videoconferencing platforms. Online peer support can offer a variety of benefits, such as overcoming geographical barriers and the opportunity to choose a platform and mode of communication that suits a person's needs and preferences. However, there is currently no synthesis of the different online peer support opportunities available to people with dementia. INCLUSION CRITERIA: Participants in this review will include people living with a self-reported diagnosis of any form of dementia. The concept is peer support through online platforms, while the context is online peer support that is accessible in English. METHODS: The review will be conducted according to the JBI methodology for scoping reviews. A 3-step strategy will be used to search 4 data sources: (1) scholarly and gray literature databases, (2) Google search engine, (3) social media and websites of dementia organizations, and (4) consultations with people with dementia and professionals. The review will be managed in Covidence and Excel. The study selection and data extraction will be conducted by 2 independent reviewers and a third reviewer will be consulted if needed. For the data extraction a draft data extraction instrument will be used, following the recommendations of JBI. Data will be extracted on platform, online peer support, and study characteristics. The findings will be presented in tables and a narrative summary. DETAILS OF THIS REVIEW PROJECT CAN BE FOUND IN OPEN SCIENCE FRAMEWORK: https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/8JTQC
Intercalating Graphite-Based Na-Ion Battery Anodes with Integrated Magnetite
Get PDFGraphite is known as the most successful anode material found for Li-ion batteries. However, unfortunately, graphite delivers an ordinary capacity as anode material for the next-generation Na-ion batteries (SIBs) due to difficulties in intercalating larger Na+ ions in between the layers of graphene due to incompatible d-spacing. The methodologies investigated in deriving suitable anode structures for SIBs are found to be either less effective, expensive, or rather too complex in most cases. Herein, a simple strategy is introduced to derive suitable anode materials for SIBs through a modified electrochemical exfoliation of graphite. The introduced exfoliation process is able to graft Fe3O4 (magnetite) on graphite allowing the structure to expand, supporting a swift intercalation and deintercalation of Na ions. The synthesized magnetite-functionalized graphene nanoplatelets are identified as a well-suited anode material for SIBs, with its efficient intercalation obtained through the expanded interlayer spacing of 3.9 Å and the surface redox pseudocapacitive activity attained through the surface-grafted magnetite. The effectiveness of the synthesized is reflected in the obtained high discharge capacitance of 420 mAh g−1, with 96% capacitive retention over 1000 cycles. The study opens new opportunities for prospective low-cost anode materials for energy storage applications
ENCODE: Breaking the Trade-Off Between Performance and Efficiency in Long-Term User Behavior Modeling
Get PDFLong-term user behavior sequences are a goldmine for businesses to explore users' interests to improve Click-Through Rate (CTR). However, it is very challenging to accurately capture users' long-term interests from their long-term behavior sequences and give quick responses from the online serving systems. To meet such requirements, existing methods 'inadvertently' destroy two basic requirements in long-term sequence modeling: R1) make full use of the entire sequence to keep the information as much as possible; R2) extract information from the most relevant behaviors to keep high relevance between learned interests and current target items. The performance of online serving systems is significantly affected by incomplete and inaccurate user interest information obtained by existing methods. To this end, we propose an efficient two-stage long-term sequence modeling approach, named as EfficieNt Clustering based twO-stage interest moDEling (ENCODE), consisting of offline extraction stage and online inference stage. It not only meets the aforementioned two basic requirements but also achieves a desirable balance between online service efficiency and precision. Specifically, in the offline extraction stage, ENCODE clusters the entire behavior sequence and extracts accurate interests. To reduce the overhead of the clustering process, we design a metric learning-based dimension reduction algorithm that preserves the relative pairwise distances of behaviors in the new feature space. While in the online inference stage, ENCODE takes the off-the-shelf user interests to predict the associations with target items. Besides, to further ensure the relevance between user interests and target items, we adopt the same relevance metric throughout the whole pipeline of ENCODE. The extensive experiment and comparison with SOTA on both industrial and public datasets have demonstrated the effectiveness and efficiency of our proposed ENCODE
The evolution of artificial empathy in the hospitality metaverse era
Get PDFAs hospitality enters the metaverse era, artificial empathy becomes essential for developing of artificial intelligence (AI) agents. Using the empathy cycle model, computational empathy frameworks and interdisciplinary research, this conceptual paper proposes a model explaining how artificial empathy will evolve in the hospitality metaverse era. The paper also addresses customer empathy and responses towards AI agents and other human actors with in the hospitality context. It explores how metaverse characteristics such as immersiveness, sociability, experiential nature, interoperability, blended virtual and physical environments as well as environmental fidelity will shape computational models and evolution of artificial empathy. Findings suggests that metaverse enables AI agents to form a seamless cycle of detection, resonation, and response to consumers’ affective states, facilitating the evolution of artificial empathy. Additionally, the paper outlines conditions under which the artificial empathy cycle may be disrupted and proposes future research questions that can advance our understanding of artificial empathy
Association between genetically predicted memory and self-reported foreign language proficiency
Get PDFBackground: Foreign language proficiency is a complex trait that reflects an individual’s ability to effectively understand and use a non-native language, shaped by both genetic and environmental factors. The aim of this study was to establish the relationship between genetically determined memory capacity and self-reported foreign language proficiency in 129 children (63 males, 66 females, age 14.2 ± 3.9) and 128 adults (90 males, 38 females, age 29.8 ± 8.2). Methods: Seven single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) previously linked with memory function were used in a polygenic analysis (CAMTA1 rs4908449, CLSTN2 rs6439886, COMT rs4680, CPEB3 rs11186856, SCN1A rs10930201, SNAP25 rs3746544, and WWC1 rs17070145). Self-reported foreign language proficiency was evaluated using a single-item question. Children’s level of immersion in foreign languages was divided into three categories: linguistic school, non-linguistic school with extra foreign language courses, and non-linguistic school without additional foreign language courses. Results: We found that genetically predicted memory capacity (i.e., number of memory-increasing alleles) was positively associated with self-reported foreign language proficiency in children (p = 0.0078 adjusted for age, sex, ethnicity, verbal IQ, and level of immersion in foreign languages). When combined, genetically predicted memory capacity, age, sex, ethnicity, verbal IQ, and level of immersion in foreign languages explained 31.5% (p < 0.0001) of the variance in children’s self-reported foreign language proficiency. The association between genetically predicted memory capacity and self-reported foreign language proficiency was replicated in adults (p = 0.0158 adjusted for age, sex, and ethnicity). Conclusions: Foreign language proficiency may partly depend on the presence of a high number of memory-increasing alleles in both children and adults