Three hundred million points suffice

Three Hundred Million Years of Attentional Selection

In this issue of Neuron, Winkowski and Knudsen reveal striking parallels between the attentional systems of the barn owl and the rhesus macaque. The observation of close similarities between the attentional systems of such distantly related organisms strongly suggest that key computational principles are at work.

A hundred million acts of whimsy?

Four hundred million years of silica biomineralization in land plants.

Biomineralization plays a fundamental role in the global silicon cycle. Grasses are known to mobilize significant quantities of Si in the form of silica biominerals and dominate the terrestrial realm today, but they have relatively recent origins and only rose to taxonomic and ecological prominence within the Cenozoic Era. This raises questions regarding when and how the biological silica cycle...

Four hundred-million-year-old vesicular arbuscular mycorrhizae.

The discovery of arbuscules in Aglaophyton major, an Early Devonian land plant, provides unequivocal evidence that mycorrhizae were established >400 million years ago. Nonseptate hyphac and arbuscules occur in a specialized meristematic region of the cortex that continually provided new cells for fungal infection. Arbuscules are morphologically identical to those of living arbuscular mycorrhiza...

One hundred million tonnes of fish , and fisheries research

The nominal fish harvest of 100 X 10” t reported for 1993, while exceeding many early predictions of “potential yield” remains well below some other, more optimistic predictions. The key elements of a sample of prediction of marine fish potentials are reviewed, enabling identification of their shared features. One of these is the tendency for initial guesses (e.g. of the relations between optim...