1,720,981 research outputs found
Ethical considerations for analogue fieldwork in extreme environments
No full textRecent movements towards decolonizing the university and promoting racial justice and equality in social relations have highlighted and challenged the colonial influences on contemporary science and scientific knowledge production. These colonial legacies have a direct bearing on power relations between the Global North and the Global South, as well as collaborations and partnerships with local scholars and local communities. Astrobiology is one scholarly discipline that often makes use of remote sites in the Global South. Here we examine the ethical implications of carrying out fieldwork that involves accessing and sampling these extreme environments. Experiences of local and international collaborations in these sites have highlighted the importance of co-learning when engaging with diverse communities of scientists and right holders living on and around field sites. We argue that adopting an ethical approach to research in these environments is relevant also to research on other celestial bodies and to the future of space exploration. We propose that understanding space and Earth as interconnected domains, mutually shaped by scientific theories and practices, calls for a new terminology: ‘planetary ethics’, which places attention on this interconnection
Draft Genome Sequence of the Extremely Desiccation-Tolerant Cyanobacterium Gloeocapsopsis sp. Strain AAB1.
No full textGloeocapsopsis sp. strain AAB1 is an extremely desiccation-tolerant cyanobacterium isolated from translucent quartz stones from the Atacama Desert (Chile). Here, we report its draft genome sequence, which consists of 137 contigs with an ∼5.4-Mb genome size. The annotation revealed 5,641 coding DNA sequences, 38 tRNA genes, and 5 rRNA genes.F.P.-S. was supported by the Spanish Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad
grant CTM2016-80095-C2-1-R. A.A.-B. thanks the European Research Council for
starting grant 307496. This work was partially supported by the Spanish Ministerio
de Economía y Competitividad grant ESP2015-69540-R.Peer reviewe
Dark microbiome and extremely low organics in Atacama fossil delta unveil Mars life detection limits
No full textArtículo escrito por un elevado número de autores, solo se referencian el que aparece en primer lugar, el nombre del grupo de colaboración, si le hubiere, y los autores pertenecientes a la UAMIdentifying unequivocal signs of life on Mars is one of the most important objectives for sending missions to the red planet. Here we report Red Stone, a 163-100 My alluvial fan–fan delta that formed under arid conditions in the Atacama Desert, rich in hematite and mudstones containing clays such as vermiculite and smectites, and therefore geologically analogous to Mars. We show that Red Stone samples display an important number of microorganisms with an unusual high rate of phylogenetic indeterminacy, what we refer to as “dark microbiome”, and a mix of biosignatures from extant and ancient microorganisms that can be barely detected with state-of-the-art laboratory equipment. Our analyses by testbed instruments that are on or will be sent to Mars unveil that although the mineralogy of Red Stone matches that detected by ground-based instruments on the red planet, similarly low levels of organics will be hard, if not impossible to detect in Martian rocks depending on the instrument and technique used. Our results stress the importance in returning samples to Earth for conclusively addressing whether life ever existed on MarsThe research leading to these results is a contribution from the Project “MarsFirstWater”, funded by the European Research Council, Consolidator Grant no 818602 to AGF, and by the Human Frontiers Science Program grant n° RGY0066/2018 to A.A.-B. Additional funding provided was provided by MINECO grant PID2019-107442RB-C32 (O.P.-B. and A.M.), Grants-in-Aid for Scientific Research from the Japan Society for Promotion of Science grant numbers 17H06458 and 21H04515 (K.F.), grant numbers 17H06456, 17H06458, 20H00195, and 21H04515 (K.F. and Y.S.), Consejería de Educación e Investigación, Comunidad Autónoma de
Madrid/European Social Fund program (MAFM), grant n° ESP2017-87690-C3-3-R (DC), Ramón y Cajal grant n° RYC2018-023943-I (L.S.-G.), AEI grant MDM-2017-0737 and MCIN/AEI grant PID2019-107442RB-C32 (V.M.-I.), MCIU/AEI (Spain) and FEDER (UE) grant n° PGC2018-094076-B I00 (J.W. and C.A.), Italian Space Agency agreement 2017-48-H.0 (T.F., J.R.B. and G.P.), the Ministry of Science of Spain grant PID2019-107442RB C31 (J.A.M., M.V., G.L.R., A.A. and F.R.), María Zambrano’ excellence grant
program (CA3/RSUE/2021-00405), funded by the Spanish Ministry of Universities (MFM), NASA Mars Exploration Program contracts NNH13ZDA018O, NNH15AZ24I, NNH13ZDA018O and LANL Laboratory Directed Research and Development (LDRD) funding XX5V (A.M.O, R.C.W., A.R. and S.M.C.), NASA-GSFC grant NNX17AJ68G (M.M. and S.S.J.), NES focused on Sample Analysis at Mars of the Mars Science Laboratory mission, and Mars Organic Molecules Analyzer of the Exomars 2022 mission (O.M., C.S., and C.F.), and grants RTI2018-094368-B-I00 and MDM-2017-0737 Unidad de Excelencia “Maria de Maeztu”- Centro de
Astrobiología (INTA-CSIC) by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Inno vation/State Agency of Research MCIN/AEI/10.13039/501100011033 and by “ERDF A way of making Europe” (C.E., M.G.V., M.M.-P., and V.P.). R.C.W. thanks Dot Delapp for performing pre-processing of the LIBS data. The authors also thanks USGS earth explorer for providing the satellite data of
Sentinel 202
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Get PDFThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Get PDF“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Get PDFWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Get PDFWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
koamabayili/VECTRON-author-checklist: VECTRON author checklist
No full textWe have done our best to complete the author checklist relating to the use of animals in the hut study. Note that the objective for the hut study was to evaluate the IRS treatment applications for residual efficacy against Anopheles mosquitoes, including the local An. coluzzii mosquito population. Cows were only used to attract mosquitoes into the huts and no tests were carried out directly on the cows. The author checklist is intended for use with studies where experiments are carried out on animals, which is why we have had such difficulty in completing this for the hut study, as many of the questions do not relate to how the cows were used
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