Alarm bells rang eight years ago with the evidence that mad cow disease could pass from cows to humans via the food chain. But new research suggests that the disease, although still a problem in a number of countries, will have a limited effect on the human population.

Words in connected speech are often assimilated to subsequent words. Some property of that upcoming word may then be determined in advance; these advance assimilatory cues may facilitate perception of that word. A gating experiment was conducted in Dutch, studying anticipatory voice assimilation between plosives, in 24 two-word combinations. In Dutch, voicing in a word-final plosive can only be...

Face detection is a mature problem in computer vision. While diverse high performing face detectors have been proposed in the past, we present two surprising new top performance results. First, we show that a properly trained vanilla DPM reaches top performance, improving over commercial and research systems. Second, we show that a detector based on rigid templates similar in structure to the V...

Recent cases of bird flu infecting humans in southeast Asia have raised fears about the possibility of a new strain of human flu that could spark a pandemic. The new outbreaks of the influenza virus (strain H5N1) in poultry in Asia were linked by sporadic reporting of human cases of infection with this virus in Vietnam and Thailand last year. By the end of last month, there had been 54 cases of...

More than 50 heads of state gathered late last month to look at ways of policing the extraordinary 'land grab' that has seen richer countries buy up at least 20 million hectares of farmland in Africa in the last two years. The United Nations is drawing up a 'code of conduct' in an effort to slow what has been described as a new scramble for Africa, while agricultural experts are calling for a n...

Os sinos são instrumentos de percussão, da famı́lia dos idiófonos. São dispositivos de produção de som apenas aparentemente simples. O seu corpo é constitúıdo de uma liga metálica chamada bronze, que é uma combinação de cobre e estanho em proporções que podem sofrer ligeiras variações. No interior do sino encontra-se o badalo um pêndulo que, quando oscila, atinge o corpo fazendo com que o sino s...

A mplification of sensory input is a common theme for almost all sensory modalities. Once a sensory signal is received, be it a photon or a molecule of saccharin, the receptor cell will append an amplifying second-messenger cascade onto the initial transduction event. Amplification of sound by hair cells within the cochlea also follows this rule, but with an important caveat: the hair cells pro...

This work explores novel mechanisms for aerial acoustic machine-machine communications. It builds on previous work by some of the authors [1], as well as others [2]. In this paper we describe aerial acoustic communication systems that sound like musical instruments. The sound primitives come from simple models for the sound of the piano, the clarinet, and the bells. The messages are coded by co...

Just how different—or the same—are objects and agents? Some developers consider agents to be objects, except with more bells and whistles. Then, there are those who see agents and objects as different even though they share many things in common. Both approaches, however, envision using objects and agents together in the development of software systems. In other words, objects and agents are tw...