Consecutive Pairs Research Articles

Structural Pattern Differences in Unbranched Rod-like RNA of Hepatitis Delta Virus affect RNA Editing.

Hepatitis delta virus (HDV) RNA forms an unbranched rod-like structure and complexes with the delta antigen (HDAg). Host ADAR1-catalyzed RNA editing at the amber/W site of the small HDAg leads to the production of the large HDAg, which inhibits replication and is required for virion assembly. For HDV genotype 1, amber/W editing is controlled by HDAg and the RNA structure immediate vicinity and downstream of the editing site. Here, the effects of 20 mutants carrying an increased length of consecutive base-pairing at various sites in HDV RNA on amber/W site editing were examined. All nine mutants carrying genomic regions that formed up to 15 consecutive base pairs, which is also the maximum length observed in 41 naturally occurring HDV genomes, showed normal editing rate. However, mutants carrying a 16 or 17 consecutive base-paired antigenomic segment located as far as 114 nt upstream could increase editing efficiency, possibly by interfering with HDAg binding. These data show for the first time that extended base-pairing upstream of the amber/W site could increase HDV RNA editing efficiency. Furthermore, it appears that the naturally occurring HDV RNA structures have been selected for suboptimal amber/W RNA editing, which favors the HDV replication cycle.

IntaRNAhelix-composing RNA-RNA interactions from stable inter-molecular helices boosts bacterial sRNA target prediction.

Efficient computational tools for the identification of putative target RNAs regulated by prokaryotic sRNAs rely on thermodynamic models of RNA secondary structures. While they typically predict RNA-RNA interaction complexes accurately, they yield many highly-ranked false positives in target screens. One obvious source of this low specificity appears to be the disability of current secondary-structure-based models to reflect steric constraints, which nevertheless govern the kinetic formation of RNA-RNA interactions. For example, often- even thermodynamically favorable- extensions of short initial kissing hairpin interactions are kinetically prohibited, since this would require unwinding of intra-molecular helices as well as sterically impossible bending of the interaction helix. Another source is the consideration of instable and thus unlikely subinteractions that enable better scoring of longer interactions. In consequence, the efficient prediction methods that do not consider such effects show a high false positive rate. To increase the prediction accuracy we devise IntaRNAhelix, a dynamic programming algorithm that length-restricts the runs of consecutive inter-molecular base pairs (perfect canonical stackings), which we hypothesize to implicitly model the steric and kinetic effects. The novel method is implemented by extending the state-of-the-art tool IntaRNA. Our comprehensive bacterial sRNA target prediction benchmark demonstrates significant improvements of the prediction accuracy and enables more than 40-times faster computations. These results indicate- supporting our hypothesis- that stable helix composition increases the accuracy of interaction prediction models compared to the current state-of-the-art approach.

The Reliability of the Seated Medicine Ball Throw for Distance

Measuring distance thrown during the Seated Medicine Ball Throw (SMBT) has been used frequently within the literature to quantify upper body explosiveness, due to the test being easy to learn, low-risk, and requiring minimal equipment. The reliability of distance thrown in the SMBT has not been broadly reported, nor have familiarization protocols been thoroughly documented. The purpose of this study is to assess the reliability of distance thrown during the SMBT as a representative measurement for upper body explosiveness in active, recreationally trained adults. Before testing, 20 subjects completed a dynamic warm-up. After learning proper technique, subjects were familiarized with the exercise by completing continuous trials using a 10 lb medicine ball, with 1 minute of rest between trials, until three consecutive throws within 0.25 m were achieved. Subjects rested 20 minutes, repeated the warm-up, and then completed 6 trials of the SMBT where distance of each throw was measured. Any trial in which technique deviated significantly from the instructions was repeated. Intraclass correlation coefficients (ICCs) were used to assess reliability between trials. Distances thrown for trials 1-6 were as follows: 3.43±0.99 m, 3.41±0.95 m, 3.48±1.00 m, 3.48±1.00 m, 3.46±1.03 m, and 3.54±1.05 m respectively. ICCs for consecutive trial pairs ranged from 0.97-0.99. These findings suggest that distance thrown is a reliable representative measure of upper body explosiveness in recreationally trained adults. The familiarization protocol used was sufficient for producing consistent performance.

EMS: AN ENHANCEDMERGE SORT ALGORITHMBY EARLY CHECKING OF ALREADY SORTED PARTS

Merge sort is one of the asymptotically optimal sorting algorithms that is used in many places including programming language library functions and operating systems. In this paper, we give a modified version of merge sort, which in practice shows substantial improvement in running time than the top-down and bottom-up implementations of the classical merge sort. Our algorithm works as a bottom-up manner and the modifications happen in three places: (a) given n elements in an array, first the algorithm considers the array as n / 2 consecutive pairs and sorts each pair in-place by one comparison; (b) in subsequent steps, during the ”merge” process of two subarrays, if the last element in the left subarray is smaller than the first element in the right subarray, the algorithm simply returns; and (c) if the last element in the right subarray is smaller than the first element in the left subarray, then the algorithm swaps the elements in the two subarrays by their entirety. Steps (b) and (c) happen in-place. For the case not in (b) or (c), the algorithm follows the classical merge technique with an extra array. Our experimental results also show that case (b) and (c) happen a good amount of time in practice and that is the reason that our algorithm gives better running time than the classical merge sort.

Vision‐based road slope estimation methods using road lines or local features from instant images

In this study, the authors study lateral and longitudinal road slope estimation, which are important parameters to control a vehicle laterally in lane-keeping assistance and longitudinally in adaptive cruise control, respectively. They present three methods estimating road slopes from instant road images obtained from a front monocular camera. In the first geometry-based (GB) method, they obtain the slope estimates using 2D road lines derived from 3D road line and pin-hole camera models. In the second local features-based (LFB) method, they use the SIFT local features between two consecutive image pairs. In the first two methods, they derive computationally simple novel analytic expressions for the road slope estimates. As a third solution in covariance based (CB) method, they consider supervised learning where they use 2D road lines as features to train their algorithm. GB and CB methods rely on road lines and provide in advance estimations that enable proactive driving, whereas LFB uses the entire image and performs estimation when the road slope actually changes. They use multi-layer perceptron learning method as a benchmark in their tests. They compare the estimation performance, system requirements, and applicable conditions of the proposed methods under controlled and uncontrolled test environments.

Regular morphisms in abelian categories

We establish some properties involving regular morphisms in abelian categories. We show a decomposition theorem on the image of a regular sum of morphisms, a characterization of regular morphisms in terms of consecutive pairs of morphisms, and a description of certain equivalent morphisms. We also generalize Ehrlich’s Theorem on one-sided unit regular morphisms by showing that if [Formula: see text] is an [Formula: see text]-regular object, then a morphism [Formula: see text] is left (right) unit regular if and only if there exists a split monomorphism (epimorphism) [Formula: see text]. We also study regular morphisms determined by generalized inverses in additive categories.

Tailored heuristics in adaptive large neighborhood search applied to the cutwidth minimization problem

The cutwidth minimization problem (CMP) consists in determining a linear layout (i.e., a one-dimensional arrangement), of the vertices of a graph that minimizes the maximum number of edges crossing any consecutive pair of vertices. This problem has applications, for instance, in design of very large-scale integration circuits, graph drawing, and compiler design. The CMP is an NP-Hard problem and presents a challenge to exact methods and heuristics. In this study, the metaheuristic adaptive large neighborhood search is applied to the CMP. The computational experiments include 11,786 benchmark instances from four sets in the literature, and the obtained results are compared with state-of-the-art methods. The proposed method was demonstrated to be competitive, as it matched most optimal and best known results, improved some of the (not proved optimal) best known solutions, and provided the first upper bounds for unsolved instances.

Donor KIR2DS1 reduces the risk of transplant related mortality in HLA-C2 positive young recipients with hematological malignancies treated by myeloablative conditioning.

BackgroundRecognition of HLA-C2 group alleles on recipient cells by activating killer immunoglobulin like receptors, KIR2DS1 on donor natural killer cells may lead to increased graft-versus-leukemia effect or immunomodulation in patients treated by allogeneic hematopoietic stem cell transplantation (allo-HSCT) influencing disease free and overall survival (OS).ObjectiveIn the present study, 314 consecutive, allo-HSCT recipient and donor pairs were included with retrospective donor KIR-genotyping and clinical parameters analyzes.ResultsAfter a median follow-up of 23.6 months, recipients with HLA-C2 group allele (rC2) showed improved (p = 0.046) OS if transplanted with KIR2DS1 positive donors (d2DS1) compared to those without one or both of this genetic attribute. Within the myeloablative conditioning (MAC) subgroup (n = 227), rC2 homozygous+d2DS1 patients (n = 14) showed a 5 years OS of 93% followed by rC2 heterozygous+d2DS1 patients (n = 48, 65%) compared to rC2 and/or d2DS1 negatives (47%, p = 0.018). Multivariate analyses indicated rC2+d2DS1 positivity as an independent predictor of OS (HR:0.47, 0.26–0.86, p = 0.014) besides donor type, presence of CMV-reactivation or chemoresistant disease. Among MAC-treated patients, the combined rC2+d2DS1 presence was associated with a markedly decreased cumulative incidence of transplant related mortality (p = 0.0045).ConclusionThe combination of rC2+d2DS1 may be a favorable genetic constellation in allo-HSCT with MAC potentially reducing transplant related mortality.

Identification of functional signatures in the metabolism of the three cellular domains of life.

In order to identify common and specific enzymatic activities associated with the metabolism of the three cellular domains of life, the conservation and variations between the enzyme contents of Bacteria, Archaea, and Eukarya organisms were evaluated. To this end, the content of enzymes belonging to a particular pathway and their abundance and distribution in 1507 organisms that have been annotated and deposited in the KEGG database were assessed. In addition, we evaluated the consecutive enzymatic reaction pairs obtained from metabolic pathway reactions and transformed into sequences of enzymatic reactions, with catalytic activities encoded in the Enzyme Commission numbers, which are linked by a substrate. Both analyses are complementary: the first considers individual reactions associated with each organism and metabolic map, and the second evaluates the functional associations between pairs of consecutive reactions. From these comparisons, we found a set of five enzymatic reactions that were widely distributed in all the organisms and considered here as universal to Bacteria, Archaea, and Eukarya; whereas 132 pairs out of 3151 reactions were identified as significant, only 5 of them were found to be widely distributed in all the taxonomic divisions. However, these universal reactions are not widely distributed along the metabolic maps, suggesting their dispensability to all metabolic processes. Finally, we found that universal reactions are also associated with ancestral domains, such as those related to phosphorus-containing groups with a phosphate group as acceptor or those related to the ribulose-phosphate binding barrel, triosephosphate isomerase, and D-ribose-5-phosphate isomerase (RpiA) lid domain, among others. Therefore, we consider that this analysis provides clues about the functional constraints associated with the repertoire of enzymatic functions per organism.

A New Species of Pentaloculum (Cestoda: “Tetraphyllidea”) from the Taiwan Saddled Carpetshark, Cirrhoscyllium formosanum (Orectolobiformes: Parascylliidae)

Collection of cestodes from the Taiwan saddled carpetshark, Cirrhoscyllium formosanum, for the first time led to the discovery of Pentaloculum hoi n. sp. This species provided important insights into the identity of the heretofore monotypic Pentaloculum-known previously only from the blind electric ray, Typhlonarke aysoni, in New Zealand. The new species differs from Pentaloculum macrocephalum in testis number, vitelline follicle and cirrus sac configuration, and in that it is hyperapolytic rather than euapolytic. Maximum-likelihood analysis of sequence data generated for the D1-D3 region of the 28S rDNA gene not only confirmed this generic placement but also confirmed the close affinities between both species of Pentaloculum and specimens previously referred to in the literature as new genus 7 n. sp. 1. Examination of limited material of the latter, including that of a second specimen from which partial 28S rDNA sequence data were generated here, led to the realization that new genus 7 n. sp. 1 represents an undescribed species of Pentaloculum, referred to here as Pentaloculum n. sp. 2. All 3 species share bothridia divided into 1 anterior and 2 consecutive pairs of loculi. Given that Pentaloculum n. sp. 2 parasitizes a member of the second and only other genus of parascylliid sharks (i.e., Parascyllium), we predict that the 4 other species of Parascyllium and the 2 other species of Cirrhoscyllium are likely to host other species of Pentaloculum. The factors that might account for the eclectic host associations of Pentaloculum, which include a torpediniform ray and 2 species of orectilobiform sharks, are currently unclear. The compilation of diet data for these elasmobranchs and determination of the final intermediate hosts for these cestodes would be interesting avenues of further investigation given that cestodes are trophically transmitted between their intermediate and definitive hosts. The phylogenetic affinities of Pentaloculum among elasmobranch cestodes remain unresolved.

1,3,9-Triaza-2-oxophenoxazine: An Artificial Nucleobase Forming Highly Stable Self-Base Pairs with Three AgI Ions in a Duplex.

Metal-mediated base pairs (MMBPs) formed by natural or artificial nucleobases have recently been developed. The metal ions can be aligned linearly in a duplex by MMBP formation. The development of a three- or more-metal-coordinated MMBPs has the potential to improve the conductivity and enable the design of metal ion architectures in a duplex. This study aimed to develop artificial self-bases coordinated by three linearly aligned AgI ions within an MMBP. Thus, artificial nucleic acids with a 1,3,9-triaza-2-oxophenoxazine (9-TAP) nucleobase were designed and synthesized. In a DNA/DNA duplex, self-base pairs of 9-TAP could form highly stable MMBPs with three AgI ions. Nine equivalents of AgI led to the formation of three consecutive 9-TAP self-base pairs with extremely high stability. The complex structures of 9-TAP MMBPs were determined by using electrospray ionization mass spectrometry and UV titration experiments. Highly stable self-9-TAP MMBPs with three AgI ions are expected to be applicable to new DNA nanotechnologies.

Discordance of Disc-Fovea Raphe Angles Determined by Optical Coherence Tomography and MP-3 Microperimetry in Eyes With a Glaucomatous Hemifield Defect.

The purpose of this study was to evaluate the concordance of a temporal raphe architecture estimated using optical coherence tomography (OCT) and MP-3 microperimetry. We enrolled 25 eyes with either an upper or lower glaucomatous hemifield defect, as detected on the Humphrey visual field 30-2 test. A structural temporal raphe was extrapolated from visible end points of retinal nerve fiber bundles present in a perimetrically normal hemiretina on an en face Spectralis OCT image. A functional temporal raphe was drawn as a line from the fovea to the border of at least a 10-dB difference in sensitivity, at vertically adjacent test points, with at least three consecutive pairs among 25 test points placed at 8° to 18° from the fovea (2° intervals) on the MP-3. An angle determined by the optic disc center, the fovea, and the temporal raphe line (the DFR angle) was calculated. Correlations and agreement of the OCT- and MP-3-derived DFR angles and factors affecting discordance of the two estimates were evaluated. Despite no significant demographic differences, the functional DFR angle (mean ± SD, 171.8° ± 3.5°) was significantly larger than that of the structural DFR angle (166.5° ± 3.2°) in 14 eyes with upper hemifield defects and vice versa in 11 eyes with lower hemifield defects (163.4° ± 3.0° vs. 170.5° ± 3.2°). The mean deviation was significantly associated with the functional and structural DFR angle difference in eyes with only upper hemifield defects. The structural temporal raphe was more deviated to the perimetrically normal hemiretina side than to the functional temporal raphe, thereby suggesting that a structural change may precede a functional loss.

A framework for crime data analysis using relationship among named entities

Many crime reports are available online in various blogs and Newswire. Though manual annotation of these massive reports is quite tedious for crime data analysis, it gives an overall crime scenario of all over the world. This motivates us to propose a framework for crime data analysis based on the online reports. Initially, the method extracts the crime reports and identifies named entities. The intermediate sequence of context words between every consecutive pair of named entities is termed as a crime vector that provides relationships between the entities. The feature vectors for each entity pair are generated from these crime vectors using the Word2Vec model. The paper considers three different types of named entity pairs to facilitate the major crime data analysis task, and for each type, similarity between every pair of entities is measured using respective feature vectors. For each type of named entity pair, a separate weighted graph is generated with entity pairs as vertices and similarity score between them as the weight of the corresponding edge. Then, Infomap, a graph-based clustering algorithm, is applied to obtain optimal set of clusters of entity pairs and a representative entity pair of each cluster. Each cluster is labelled by the relationship, represented by the crime vector, of its representative entity pair. In reality, all the entity pairs in a cluster may not reflect contextual similarity with their representative entity pair. So the clusters are further partitioned into subclusters based on WordNet-based path similarity measure which makes the entity pairs in each subcluster more contextually similar compared to their original cluster. These subclusters provide us various statistical crime information over the time period. The method is experimented only using the crime reports related to crime against women in India. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of the method compared to others for analysing the crime data.

Structure of Polydisperse fcc Nanocrystals: Implications for Crystal Fractionalization

Synthesis of nanocrystals yields polydisperse distributions, which not only implies a distribution of nanocrystal sizes but also of shapes. Noting that the synthesis products often reflect kinetic effects and may not reflect minimum energy states, we propose that the nanocrystals (of gold, silver, platinum, etc.) typically used in self-assembly and directed-assembly experiments consist predominantly of variations of single-crystal face-centered cubic truncated octahedra with closed shells of atoms. Between each consecutive pair of “magic number” (maximally symmetric) truncated octahedra, we identify 49 sizes with some degeneracy, for a total of 70 distinct closed-shell configurations. Energetic and geometric features of the nanocrystals for these special sizes are analyzed. Combining these results with previous theoretical models, we discuss the implications for crystal fractionalization, where polydisperse nanocrystals spontaneously phase-separate into single and multiple binary superlattices. We show th...

RangeFinder: Accelerating ball-interference queries against steady lattices

Advances in additive manufacturing techniques are enabling the fabrication of new microstructures and materials. These may often be defined in terms of a set of balls and of beams that each connects two balls. To support application needs, we must efficiently support structures with billions of beams. To address this challenge, we advocate steady lattices, which implicitly define a u×v×w array of groups of balls such that each consecutive pair of groups in a given direction is related by the same similarity transformation and such that the beams are defined to periodically connect the same corresponding, relatively-indexed pairs of balls. We propose an algorithm that accelerates the Ball-Interference Query (BIQ), which establishes which balls and beams of the lattice interfere with a query ball Q. Our RangeFinder solution reduces the asymptotic time-complexity of BIQ from O(uvw) to O(uv). For special cases, it reduces the complexity even further down to O(u) and O(1). In our tests, RangeFinder reduced the query time by up to a factor of 9420 times. RangeFinder does not use any spatial occupancy data structure and can be trivially parallelized. We demonstrate the effectiveness of RangeFinder on standard lattices and also on their multi-level Lattice-in-Lattice (LiL) variants.

Feasibility of support vector machine learning in age-related macular degeneration using small sample yielding sparse optical coherence tomography data.

A retrospective pilot study is conducted to demonstrate the utility of a novel support vector machine learning (SVML) algorithm in a small three-dimensional (3D) sample yielding sparse optical coherence tomography (spOCT) data for the automatic monitoring of neovascular (wet) age-related macular degeneration (wAMD). From the anti-vascular endothelial growth factor injection database, 588 consecutive pairs of OCT volumes (57.624 B-scans) were selected in 70 randomly chosen wAMD patients treated with ranibizumab. The SVML algorithm was applied to 183 OCT volume pairs (17.934 B-scans) in 30 patients. Four independent, diagnosis-blinded retina specialists indicated whether wAMD activity was present between 100 pairs of consecutive OCT volumes (9800 B-scans) in the remaining 40 patients for comparison with the SVML algorithm and a non-complex baseline algorithm using only retinal thickness. The SVML algorithm was assessed using inter-observer variability and receiver operating characteristic (ROC) analyses. The retina specialists showed an average Cohen's κ of 0.57±0.13 (minimum: 0.41, maximum: 0.83). The average κ between the proposed algorithm and the retina specialists was 0.62±0.05 and 0.43±0.14 between the baseline algorithm and the retina specialists. Using each of the four retina specialists as the reference, the proposed method showed a superior area under the ROC curve of 0.91±0.03 compared to the ROC 0.81±0.05 shown by the baseline algorithm. The SVML algorithm was as effective as the retina specialists were in detecting activity in wAMD. Support vector machine learning (SVML) may be a useful monitoring tool in wAMD suited for small samples that yield sparse OCT data possibly derived from self-measuring OCT-robots.

Rapid formylation of the cellular initiator tRNA population makes a crucial contribution to its exclusive participation at the step of initiation.

Initiator tRNAs (i-tRNAs) possess highly conserved three consecutive GC base pairs (GC/GC/GC, 3GC pairs) in their anticodon stems. Additionally, in bacteria and eukaryotic organelles, the amino acid attached to i-tRNA is formylated by Fmt to facilitate its targeting to 30S ribosomes. Mutations in GC/GC/GC to UA/CG/AU in i-tRNACUA/3GC do not affect its formylation. However, the i-tRNACUA/3GC is non-functional in initiation. Here, we characterised an Escherichia coli strain possessing an amber mutation in its fmt gene (fmtam274), which affords initiation with i-tRNACUA/3GC. Replacement of fmt with fmtam274 in the parent strain results in production of truncated Fmt, accumulation of unformylated i-tRNA, and a slow growth phenotype. Introduction of i-tRNACUA/3GC into the fmtam274 strain restores accumulation of formylated i-tRNAs and rescues the growth defect of the strain. We show that i-tRNACUA/3GC causes a low level suppression of am274 in fmtam274. Low levels of cellular Fmt lead to compromised efficiency of formylation of i-tRNAs, which in turn results in distribution of the charged i-tRNAs between IF2 and EF-Tu allowing the plasmid borne i-tRNACUA/3GC to function at both the initiation and elongation steps. We show that a speedy formylation of i-tRNA population is crucial for its preferential binding (and preventing other tRNAs) into the P-site.

The Effect of Antitumor Antibiotic Olivomycin A and Its New Semi-synthetic Derivative Olivamide on the Activity of Murine DNA Methyltransferase Dnmt3a.

Olivomycin A is a highly active antitumor drug that belongs to the family of aureolic acid antibiotics. The antitumor effect of olivomycin A is related to its ability to bind to the DNA minor groove in GC-rich regions as Mg2+-coordinated complexes. Characterization of cellular targets of olivomycin A and its mechanism of action is crucial for the successful application of this antibiotic in clinical practice and development of semi-synthetic derivatives with improved pharmacological properties. Previously, we have shown that minor groove ligands are able to disrupt the key epigenetic process of DNA methylation. In this paper, we have studied the impact of olivomycin A and its improved semi-synthetic analogue N,N-dimethylaminoethylamide of 1'-des-(2,3-dihydroxy-n-butyroyl)-1'-carboxy-olivomycin A (olivamide) on the functioning of de novo DNA methyltransferase Dnmt3a (enzyme that carries out methylation of cytosine residues in the DNA CG-sites in eukaryotic cells) using an in vitro system consisting of the murine Dnmt3a catalytic domain and a 30-mer DNA duplex containing four consecutive GC pairs. We have shown that olivomycin A and olivamide inhibit Dnmt3a with IC50 of 6 ± 1 and 7.1 ± 0.7 μM, respectively. Neither olivomycin A nor olivamide interfered with the formation of the specific enzyme-substrate complex; however, olivomycin A prevented formation of the covalent DNA-Dnmt3a intermediate that is necessary for the methylation reaction to proceed. The inhibitory effects of olivomycin A and olivamide can be explained by the disruption of the enzyme catalytic loop movement through the DNA minor groove (the reaction stage that precedes the covalent bond formation between DNA and the enzyme). The results of this work indicate the epigenetic contribution to the antitumor effect of aureolic acid group antibiotics.

Unsupervised Learning of Accurate Camera Pose and Depth From Video Sequences With Kalman Filter

Unsupervised learning-based scene perception has recently become an important research direction. Most unsupervised methods for scene perception tasks (e.g., dense depth recovery and ego-motion estimation) train the convolutional network via minimizing the photometric error of images, achieving very impressive results. Since the supervision signal is weaker than ground truth data, the existing unsupervised methods generally do poorly inaccurate pose estimation and high-resolution depth map generation. To this end, we present an architecture based on the convolutional neural network and the Kalman filter, which is used for unsupervised learning of accurate ego-motion and high-resolution single view depth, with as fewer parameters as possible. Specifically, we first present pose network (P-CNN) with the decoupled (multi-stream) convolutional network for learning accurate camera pose (translation and rotation vector) to avoid the fault aliasing of multiple camera pose, with a relatively light-weighted network. Then, for the sake of improving the relationship of features between consecutive image pairs, we introduce the Kalman filter into the learning framework to improve the smoothness of the estimated camera pose. Finally, in order to decode a high-resolution depth map with a less uneven and unsmooth area, we adopt a new upsampling module in the encoder-decoder architecture of depth network (D-CNN). The extensive experiments are implemented on the KITTI driving dataset, proving that our method obviously predicts a more accurate camera pose and a clear depth map.

Light pollution causes object collisions during local nocturnal manoeuvring flight by adult Manx Shearwaters Puffinus puffinus

Understanding the detrimental effects of anthropogenic light on nocturnally mobile animals is a long-standing problem in conservation biology. Seabirds such as shearwaters and petrels can be especially affected, perhaps because of their propensity to fly close to the surface, making them vulnerable to encountering anthropogenic light sources. We investigated the influence of light pollution on adult Manx Shearwaters Puffinus puffinus at close range in foggy conditions. We recorded collisions with a building at a breeding colony for six consecutive pairs of intervals in which the house lights were left on as normal for 135 seconds, then turned off for 135 seconds. The relationship between lighting condition and collision frequency was highly significant, with a collision rate in the presence of lighting around 25 times that in its absence. Our results show that birds were clearly affected by the lights, by being either directly attracted, or disorientated during flight close to the structure. This could have been due to the light source itself, or an indirect effect of the all-round reflective glow in the fog perhaps interfering with visual or magnetic control inputs on both sides of the bird simultaneously. Our results suggest a mechanism by which the screening of artificial lights close to shearwater breeding areas, at least during foggy nights, could lead to improved welfare and survival at breeding colonies.