Wildlife mortality involving bongos, Tragelaphus eurycerus, and other ungulates was investigated in the north of the Congo Republic in 1997. Four bongos, one forest buffalo, Syncerus caffer nanus, and one domestic sheep were examined and sampled. Although an outbreak of rinderpest had been suspected, it was found that the animals, which had been weakened by an Elaeophora sagitta infection and p...

Vestibular migraine (VM), a common cause of vestibular symptoms within the general population, is a disabling and poorly understood form of dizziness. We sought to examine the underlying pathophysiology of VM with three studies, which involved the central synthesis of canal and otolith cues, and present preliminary results from each of these studies: (1) VM patients appear to have reduced motio...

It is a challenge for the human body to maintain stable blood pressure while standing. The body's failure to do so can lead to dizziness or even fainting. For decades it has been postulated that the vestibular organ can prevent a drop in pressure during a position change--supposedly mediated by reflexes to the cardiovascular system. We show--for the first time--a significant correlation between...

We present a robust method for time-frequency model estimation. It involves a robust Leclerc’s estimator to ensure robustness w.r.t. noise and interferences present in timefrequency representations. This scheme is applied to fish age and growth analysis from otolith images. This application involves the estimation of the parameters of a priori fish growth models using this robust time-frequency...

It is generally accepted that the formation of otolith microstructures (L- and D-zones) and in particular the organic and mineral fractions vary on a daily basis. Raman microspectrometry provides a nondestructive technique that can be used to provide structural information on organic and mineral compounds. We applied it to thin otolith sections of hake in order to address the following issues: ...

Acknowledgments: Authors thank Tom Bennett and Valerie Stallings for their technical contributions, Margaret Marsden and Patty Cunningham for their administrative assistance, and Drs. Lionel Zupan and Rick Lewis for commenting on early versions of the manuscript. Experiments were performed at the Legacy Neurotology Research Laboratory. ABSTRACT To investigate the neural mechanisms that humans u...

The dedicated facility built for the assembling of the nearly 1000 RPC units of the ATLAS m-spectrometer is described in detail. The necessity of keeping the gravitational sagitta below 10 mm for the 5-m-long RPC units has driven the careful design of the extruded Al lateral profiles and suspension end-plates. A special assembly table allows to maintain the mechanical tolerances of each unit we...

Numerous planktonic species have disjunct distribution patterns in the world's oceans. However, it is unclear whether these are truly unconnected by gene flow, or whether they are composed of morphologically cryptic species. The marine planktonic chaetognath Sagitta setosa Müller has a discontinuous geographic distribution over the continental shelf in the northeastern Atlantic, Mediterranean S...

Otolith morphology analysis is one of the main tools used for fish or stock identification. Moreover, otolith shape can also be in animal dietary studies (stomach content) identification prey fishes and their size according to relationship between sizes. In present study, length morphological dimensions was investigated sabre squirrelfish, Sargocentron spiniferum (Forsskål, 1775) (family: Holoc...