The DNA-binding protein PRDM9 has a critical role in specifying meiotic recombination hotspots in mice and apes, but it appears to be absent from other vertebrate species, including birds. To study the evolution and determinants of recombination in species lacking the gene that encodes PRDM9, we inferred fine-scale genetic maps from population resequencing data for two bird species: the zebra f...

Vol. LII (June 2015), 325–336 325 © 2015, American Marketing Association ISSN: 0022-2437 (print), 1547-7193 (electronic) *Bo Zhou is Assistant Professor in Marketing, Robert H. Smith School of Business, University of Maryland (e-mail: [email protected]). Carl F. Mela is T. Austin Finch Foundation Professor, Fuqua School of Business, Duke University (e-mail: [email protected]). Wilfred Amaldoss ...

Cuckoo eggs famously mimic those of their foster parents to evade rejection from discriminating hosts. Here we test whether parasites benefit by repeatedly parasitizing the same host nest. This should make accurate rejection decisions harder, regardless of the mechanism that hosts use to identify foreign eggs. Here we find strong support for this prediction in the African tawny-flanked prinia (...

Cutaneous pigmentation is a well-recognized feature of idiopathic haemochromatosis and, in various series, has been recorded in up to 8o per cent. of patients (Finch and Finch, I955). In the world literature there are occasional reports of pigmentation in the gums (Saundby, I890), buccal mucous membranes (Richardiere, I895), lips (Parker, I903), and tongue (Hess and Zurhelle, I905), and Maddox ...

This paper presents a new framework for self-supervised sensorimotor learning. We demonstrate this framework with a system that learns to mimic a zebra finch, directly modeled on the dynamics of how male fledglings acquire birdsong from their fathers. Our system first listens to the song of an adult finch. By listening to its own initially nascent attempts at mimicry through an articulatory syn...

The derivation of stably cultured cell lines has been critical to the advance of molecular biology. We profiled gene expression in the first two generally available cell lines derived from the zebra finch. Using Illumina RNA-seq, we generated ~93 million reads and mapped the majority to the recently assembled zebra finch genome. Expression of most Ensembl-annotated genes was detected, but over ...

Habitat destruction and predation by invasive alien species has led to the disappearance of several island populations of Darwin's finches but to date none of the 13 recognized species have gone extinct. However, driven by rapid economic growth in the Galápagos, the effects of introduced species have accelerated and severely threatened these iconic birds. The critically endangered mangrove finc...

The black-throated finch is an endangered species whose highest quality remaining habitat directly overlaps with the site of controversial Adani Carmichael coal mine in Central Queensland, Australia. image this has been widely used by anti-Adani protest groups as a powerful symbol for destructive nature greenfield mining. Drawing on extinction studies literature, we problematise use imminent ex...

Methods for studying the neural code in high dimensions Alexandro D. Ramirez Over the last two decades technological developments in multi-electrode arrays and fluorescence microscopy have made it possible to simultaneously record from hundreds to thousands of neurons. Developing methods for analyzing these data in order to learn how networks of neurons respond to external stimuli and process i...